Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (84 page)

Up our tree, Shirl sat waiting, long-suffering and calm as any spouse. Eager to hear about my social triumph, she hollered hostess questions down through elm leaves. I climbed towards a sweet voice pleading: Had they served mints both pink
and
green? Types of floral centerpieces, please? I moaned. Around her, a full skirt was spread. She’d worn, for me, what she would of worn to the party if they’d asked her. Perfect, she’d tied bows of crepe paper to our household twigs. It broke my heart.

In one of Poppa’s Fenimore Coopers, I’d read where this friendly Indian and white man cut open their veins to become blood brothers forever. I wanted my heart now circulating some droplet souvenir of Shirl for good. I understood—after digging at my privates publicly, after snarling at a holy Saiterwaite—high society was now but a thing of the past. I was ready for the next part: Shirley. For her, I’d given all of it up, I’d half killed poor Momma. Odd—I only believed in Momma’s pain onct it’d finally happened. Her strange calm had made me think of her when young, when hurt so.

But poor Shirl sat pumping for the Mayor’s punch recipe. I was not often stingy with details (as you yourself should know by now!), but I just shrugged off Shirl’s every question. Seeing I was in a darker mood, Shirl said she’d settle for a last teensy fact: How did the inside of our mayor’s finest mansion parlor really look?

My answer: “Big.”

Shirl smoothed her skirt (a painful green) over knees, she made her either dimple show, she tossed the curls and spoke to our tin tea set arranged just so before her. “But
how
big, Luce?”

Behind me, I undid the sack, pulled out the book, leaving the knife for later. I read the Mohican rite where your blending of veins happens. “Sounds mighty good, don’t it?” She half nodded, still eager for news of a party I only wanted to forever forget. “Sounds mighty good, okay,” I answered my own self. “Let’s us do it. Only, we’ll be blood
sisters.”

“But how?” When I whipped out Momma’s best butcher knife, Shirley slapped a palm to either cheek, gave this squeal I thought was absolutely precious. My hip bones went pure sponge. Below our elm, on sidewalk, the postman spun in circles, looking for a crime. Then I did one hour of fast-talk convincing, told Shirl how this swap would make us stronger, we’d each catch half as many colds.

Finally I offered to go first—just a light scratch, see? You could only feel amazed at all the color waiting inside a skinny white girl. It filled my hand, red coated each finger in its bright new separate glove. Then I cut Shirl as—eyes closed, frowning—her free hand pinched her nose. We made the magical mingling (I’d agreed to be the Indian, leaving her the choicer white role). Our wrists nuzzled wetness to mother wetness. We invented vows, shivered, spoke Red Indian place names aloud.

“There,” I said when all felt done. Shirl even kissed a red pinkie fingertip, pressed it to my forehead, left pink streaked there. But onct our blood was swapped sufficient, drainage didn’t quit. It longed to be transfusion. We used old curtains as bandages, we ripped down crepe paper but party favors proved flimsy tourniquets. First we snickered, seeing our losses flung on leaves, boards. Then we went, “Uh-oh.” What had started as a poem was ending as emergency. (Like life, child!)

One-armed, we gimped down, and—even with her leaking pints and ruining good clothes—Shirl called back, “Crust on the finger sandwiches? Cut to triangles? Watercress and what?”

We later found that each of us, when mothers asked how it’d happened, said, “From picking blackberries. A thorn.”

NOBODY
spoke to me after the party where I dug into, up, and beneath my underpants. Girls that’d been present turned away. Girls that wished they’d been there really gave me the works, peeved that homely me had been so careless with my good luck. Come school on Monday, I was shamed like some brat who—in a land of famine—throws away a banquet of leftovers and has not shared. On my way home from class, some unseen person chugged a heavy green walnut at me, over a fence. Luckily, I ducked. I couldn’t exactly complain to Momma, could I? All invitations quit. That, she noticed. Three meals a day, she kept her diluted half-cheerful air and sometimes smiled my way. She said, “Hello, suicide.” Poppa asked her to
please ease up. “Samuel, have you written your sophisticated parents a thank-you note? No? Why, they’ll be mortified,” she then apologized to him, scared of herself.

If I told some colorful story at table, she’d rush me for the letter of the law, “How
big
a pumpkin?” Pop said it just showed I was having my way with the world, peeling a bit off, adding a inch on. “An inch? Hold up your hands, young lady, show how large. I’ll go get my tape measure and tomorrow we’ll just march downtown and we will simply check. I cannot abide liars.”

She swept off to her needlework room. I sat picking at my bandaged wrist. Pop gave me his crooked grin. “My wife,” he shrugged, nodding her way.

“Our wife,” I said without thinking. He laughed agreement.

I THEN
decided what I’d known: Coming out would always be beyond me. After my party setback, after being fortified by my chosen sister’s blood, I could now act more myself. Momma would never shoehorn
me
into no ball gown at seventeen. I’d give it to the poor or shred it into silky kite tails.

I had always tended more towards Poppa. Now I got up from my place at table and I announced, “I’m climbing into your lap.” He pushed back his chair, made room for me, I held on to him like a monkey. “You’ll see,” he said, like trying and soothe me with a promise, but he never said what I’d see.

Soon I plainly copied his bowlegged walk—Momma feared I’d caught the rickets. I chewed on grass’s white stem ends, read dime-novel Westerns, made water willy-nilly under shrubs. I memorized Pop’s funnier lines and sprung them on poor Shirl. Something got lost when I scratched my head and used his shambling swamp-boy manner.—Momma meantime played piano, paced, sulked, dragged me to church more. She made me give her a penny every time I imitated somebody or stretched the truth or said old Ain’t.

The night I turned twelve, I already owed her a hundred and thirty dollars plus change.

CAME
a visiting evangelist, a real pulpit pounder, young, all shoulders, full of examples, using a voice with more ups and downs than any foot-treadle Singer. He wore too much oil on his hair so he could flop it side to side and make a point. Other Baptist girls and women praised him. Shirl and me decided they were hypocrites. Instead of saying, “I dearly love the way that boy looks. He’s sure got one Mount Zion of a chin on him, don’t he?”—they’d go, “The Lord has certainly given our visiting pastor a pleasant appearance, to the greater glory of God.” “Full of the spirit of the blood of the lamb” can mean “Cute.”

This bold boy devoted six Monday nights to Genesis. Church was
jammed, women mostly. When the preacher took off his black coat and slowly rolled up his shirt sleeves—admiring his pale arms’ own beauty—it seemed our communion for the night would be his white-bread biceps, honey—probably a taste treat, too. He was full of lingo and brackets, that one. He told us, right off, how out of all the churches he had faced, he’d never seen such good-looking Christians under one consecrated roof. Folks lowered their eyes, grinning a little. Then he added that
he
knew the extra temptations of the flesh thrown into the paths of those cursed with beauty—
he
could read minds just by looking pew to pew. Faces sobered, eyes aimed at knees, at handsome knees. Soon the boy’s voice rushed at you broad and deep as you heard the Mississippi was—not like our usual preacher’s frozen ditch of sound.

“Yes.” The boy wonder unbuttoned his collar and the shirt by accident fell open on a chest surprisingly hairy for a person his age. “Yes, as your youth nowadays might put it, those two gardeners ‘had it knocked,’ were ‘made for each other,’ went ‘hand in glove’ with the green world. They walked around unclothed. Why dress if you never set foot out of your own greenhouse? Their one job? Enjoy the grounds and animals and love each other round the clock.”

Of course—he explained, a regular scholar—there won’t no clocks yet. Clocks came with clothes. Clothes were clocks. What need of a clock if you’re never going to die? Who’d bother setting a alarm clock if there won’t no Death to put the “dead” in “deadline”?

Shirl and me sat holding hands, studying each other’s cuticle condition.

Since I got permanently cut out of the Summit crowd, we’d had some hard times but finally—when she seen that I was It for her—we drew closer. First Shirl complained that Emily Saiterwaite’d blamed
her
for how I’d misbehaved. I urged Shirley to spend more time in our tree house, where we both forgot the ranking and squabbles below. The catchy preacher was giving hell to Adam and Eve for messing up a good thing. “They didn’t know when they were well-off, did they, brothers and sisters? This pair got offered the deal of a lifetime but could they coast on it? Well, could they?” Everybody grew still, like fearing they’d be called on, blamed. Why did church always point the finger our way? Preacher after preacher told Lucy she was a Sinner. A tad of mischief was all I’d admit to. Maybe I
wanted
to do wrong but I’d never really got the chance.

Instead, I sat in church planning what I’d bring on our next elm-tree picnic. “My friends—my pretty-is-as-pretty-does loved ones—back then the whole world was a combination resort and greenhouse. The only two people alive were the perfect couple—most likely to succeed. They got free food. Everything grew on trees then. No rents, no taxes, no maintenance, carefree as monkeys. Every day in Eden was another brand of Sunday. It never even rained in that garden. Genesis tells us how a nightly dew refreshed things on a frequent basis. No umbrellas, no nothing. These caretakers did not
even have to (I’ll use a farming term in this fine farming community of yours), have to weed.’ There weren’t any. And what’d they do with this bounty? What?”

I sat holding Shirl’s perfect hand, I sat remembering her first visit to the tree house. I’d built the place with Pop’s help, hoping I could one day know one friend good enough to let her in the club. If you put a floor inside a elm tree’s bell shape—you’ve made you a perfect dome-topped room. For wallpaper? Why, yellow and green leaves, moving. You can peek down without others seeing up and in. A tree house is the most private public place in the world.

That first time up, I’d climbed ahead of Shirl. I stared back, warning her which handholds were rickety, which sure—I couldn’t have her fall on her first visit. I sat back on my haunches and waited. I had heard how babies arrive in the world headfirst. Shirl’s forehead slid into sight. Blue eyes seemed about three-fourths of her whole noggin. She’d never been up so high in her life. Seeing how cozy I’d made it shocked her into saying, “Ahh.” To have her in this leaf room—was like being both in a church and on some private dirigible kite. With street sounds squawking far below you, you felt a sweetness akin to best lonely moments of clear thinking in the privy.

“This,” Shirl announced, “is our
real
home.” She commenced tying this limb to that one, swagging green aside like drapes. How safe I felt when she spoke, “Home.”

Next visit, Shirley brought two cloth-covered hangers. Warm days, we’d shuck our dresses. We’d play Mom and Poppa while wearing just chemises. She hooked our clothes over some handy limb. Dresses turning in the breeze looked like bright flags flying. A whole nation we’d discovered and founded. We were its two co-presidents, its favorite actresses. And nobody knew.

Even on street level, we lived out our own treasure map. Other folks saw Falls—but the true one was ours. We hid flowers for each other inside empty lampposts, in a statue’s hand that unscrewed off the war statue downtown. Nobody knew. We adopted one step of the courthouse to be our message board. On my way to school from the highroad on the hill’s crest, I’d lay out two magnolia leaves under a blue rock alongside a store-bought seashell. Hurrying home, I’d find—on our holy spot—my things vanished and her substitutes: a rhinestone button missing a few back molars, plus a nasty green comb she’d found somewhere. I sat down beside this news from her. I laughed. Adults stepped past me. Nobody noticed my chuckling or cared. Such tidbits were our code and meant something definite. They meant: Us. They said: We live in this town, too. We count in general because we matter to each other. Us, separately, we ain’t one whit more interesting than we find each other to be. Which is pretty interesting. Every grownup on Falls’ sidewalks knows our names, our folks. Nobody really knows us. We like it this way. We go to school—we don’t care about school. We sleep in grownups’ houses. Those ain’t our true home. Us two lived
disguised
as little girls. We only put up with it because it frees us for one another, we
can hold hands right in church while being hollered at, we can sleep so near each other. We carry a garden in our looks at one another, a secret garden—the best kind.

Now the boy preacher was heading down the final stretch and—no surprise—here come Jesus. Nailed to the tree for our sins. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, run through with pikes and set upright with perfect naked innocence, pinned to it. Shirl and I knew, you could do more things with a tree than just get tacked there. I kept my fist around the knuckles of a pink fine live girl.

“Blood of the Lamb” didn’t hold a patch to the cut-wrist sisterhood betwixt Shirl and me. So, in the nobbed and worked-up church we sat trying to look like all the other wicked ones. Only, we won’t wicked! During the last hymn that ran for forty verse, one called “Just As I Am, Without a Prayer,” the boy ordered Sinners to come up front now, admit to having fallen off and dropped and lost it. Get right with God. You’ll feel better. Tell every soul present how you’re stained and soiled within. How you’ve lost hope of all garden possibilities but how you want back in. Others shoved past us—coarse bear-sized adults, faces bunchy with regrets—dragging forward right in front of everybody, scared as hell of hell, fearful of their weedy crimes. Meantime, we just settled lower in our pew, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, alone together in peace. If you
are
the secret garden, how can you be turned out of it?