Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (92 page)

Then I saw he sat ripping at the coin-sized bunions that wouldn’t never
go away, I saw he was near crying. “Shouldn’t ought to have, is all. That, I know. But I appreciate your hearing me out. Had to tell. I thank you, my Lucy Luck.”

I slid nearer, he put his big head on my shoulder. Brushing my cheekbone, one of his cowlicks, cactus-stiff as ever. My husband was off in Dare County, buying/selling. My mother and children were one room away.

“Why did you leave here?” he asked me. “If I’d of known what I was trading to a stranger and right off my own porch, why I’d of shot any man looked at you. It ain’t ever been the same, gal. I ain’t. My own blind Cambridge-type ambition, it seems to undo me every time.—Us climbers suffer.”

MIDWAY
through Shirley’s second pregnancy, two specialists got hired. I grilled Castalia, my favorite midwife, for news. Of course, richest families used white doctors and not her. Still, Cassie stayed privy to news of carryings for sixty miles around. She told me, “They done sent telegrams to doctors from away far off. And that baby ain’t been but five months in the oven.”

I fixed a ring of homemade aspic. Poppa buggied me to their fine home out of town, set up on its own green hill. We rode fast so my present wouldn’t melt. On their polished veranda, a live pinky-white cockatoo in a frilly cage give me this look like “What
do you
want, white trash?” Pop, waiting—shy—out by the horses, signaled I should go ahead and knock. I handed my present to a brown maid. All in black and white, uniform and cap, she looked stern, starchy, printed-like as the Queen of Hearts.

“Just tell them to keep the plate.” I backed off, then added, “But, how about her health, Mrs. Shirley Anne’s?”

“Miss Lady,” the maid stepped towards me, pulling the teakwood front door closed behind her. “They’s a doctor up them stairs from Washington. And I mean Washington
State.”

I asked, could I leave a little note? She fetched me two engraved cards: “Mr. and Mrs. Cheatham Hamilton III, Hilltop Farm.” It took me a while, bearing down on a porch banister, biting my tongue, writing careful: “Shirl, Now ‘ain’t you ‘shamed, you sleepyhead?’ Rise and shine, girl. A friend still. Luce.”

Jotting, it came to me—our poem was probably Mr. Stevenson’s only one with Ain’t rearing up anywheres in it. No wonder I’d picked it. Then, uneasy at this huge home with its view of miles of view, the foyer’s marble statue (a boy getting a splinter from his foot) and the stained-glass cool as ice cube in the hall yonder, I printed the other card. “Do get well soon. Sincerely, Mrs. Lucille Marsden.” I handed the maid this last one. She’d watched me write out both. She sighed, like disappointed with me, said, “My man used to work at her poppa’s, shoveling out them stalls. Me and her goes way. Now, don’t you be standing on no ceremony, not with her like
this
. You give me both them.” I did. I thanked her.—People are always surprising you.

Halfway back to town, Pop decided
he
wanted to go indoors, visit Shirley.
But soon as he turned our cart around, he lost his nerve. Once home, he got as drunk as I’d ever seen him. Captain was back by then and Poppa came over to our house, nearbout woke the children. Mr. Marsden, disgusted, sent Poppa reeling back to his own end of Summit. (All along, Poppa, he did drink some. Did I say that?)

TO BUY
the flowers I wanted, I used half a week of food money. I would just serve more rice next week. I didn’t care. I ordered a spray of white gardenias (Greek-vase-shaped) with two rosebuds tucked deep into it. Nobody but me would understand what it meant: two red children playing in a white tub.

Momma babysat my three. Poppa walked me to the funeral. From other liverymen, Shirl’s dad had borrowed six matched white horses to pull the black-plumed carriage waiting out front. The crowd was talkative and huge. The Governor hisself was present. His police escort smoked out front. Daddy and me’d just slipped in when ushers shut the doors for lack of room.

Among the dark clothes, I noted three real wide black hats, veils thick as mosquito netting. Headgear was so dark, the owners had to pull layers aside before I recognized my aunts. They looked relieved that Pop and me had wedged in before the doors shut. Their stark faces welcomed me like to some club. They looked odd, clothes too tight, long out of date. Slow, I understood: They’d wore their outgrown widow’s weeds from the day, ages back, when they buried their un-husband/poet.

They hadn’t loved (or even much liked) my Shirley. But they offered me a nod and, onct they saw us settle, lowered their veils, turned to face the front, moving like one unit all rehearsed. (By now they knew what I might expect of married life. Maybe that’d helped them decide that Shirl, from earlier, had been among my life’s true loves. I believed them. As always, I felt honored to be loved by these worthy women.)

Shirley’s mother could not be present. She just won’t able to believe it all. Poor woman had been taken for some rest at a hospital out past Durham, a place the Baptist preacher got her into, still pulling strings for the lady. (I figured she had enjoyed nineteen years of daily happiness. It was, I told myself, more than most folks ever get.)

Though Shirl and me had barely nodded in seven years, sitting here I felt as close to her as ever, closer. Only feelings for my own children could compare. I saw the two of us riding in a bath the very color our own histories would be. I saw us up a tree—veins opened as a sign of sweetest feelings, not spigoting off when the ritual quit. We won’t ever able to stanch what-all we’d unlatched in each other. Going our separate ways had been the only answer.

I stood in line with strangers. Curiosity seekers, some of them, come to see a woman said to be this beautiful, known to be this rich, now as dead as anybody gets. Shirl’s dad waited on the front row, his face swollen something awful. He saw me—reached out one flat hairy hand my way, I broke
line, gave his fist and shoulder a good squeeze, kissed his forehead. “Lucy,” he said. “Somebody got our girl. They’s been a mistake.”

One row behind him, the Summit crowd who’d offered Shirl her first step up, who’d acted so mean about her later successes. Now here they sat clumped around Emily Saiterwaite, all in deepest mourning. I knew that, forever after, they’d speak of their dear dear departed friend. They watched me with Shirl’s poppa. Two of them—cautious—nodded. My mother’s daughter, after all, I looked right through them, cut them purblind dead. And it felt excellent.

I WANTED
to walk past her open coffin. That way you know it’s true. Her infant daughter’s small casket was shut, Shirley’s not. Seemed important to see my old friend stretched out in white silk, wearing many more yards of it than had ever been needed in real life. White, always her best shade—laid safe between tufted margins of it—here she was, perfect finally.

People were dropping roses, violet bouquets across her lap. Shirl’s face showed this sheen like porcelain or the wax-smelling tuberoses banked around her box. Some grim priss at Black’s Home of the Funerary Arts (the best) had seen fit to link Shirley’s hands in prayer and place them on her chest. Honey, it looked tacky. Shirl would’ve just hated that. Lilies of the valley had been stuffed between her palms and, under joined fingers, at the edge of her silk sleeve on the left, I saw it, plain.

Not as bad a scar as mine, not near so raw-looking—but a puffy pinkish Z shape. What she’d almost showed me when she moved to take her glove off that last day we met. Nobody knew I won’t just tossing in a nosegay like the others. I bent, touched the spot. It was, no surprise, right cool—somewhere between feeling of marble, chill beef fat, tomato aspic, and somebody alive. When I shuffled back to my place beside Poppa, when I slumped down, it seemed like I’d just run about twelve miles.

“A ideal wife and mother,” the preacher was saying. A Baptist and a Episcopal one (their bishop, no less) shared the pulpit. Four times they mentioned the Governor’s being here. The young husband sat, neutral in his starched collar on the front row. He held their baby boy all dressed in a black velvet suit and matching beret, some of Shirley’s gifts to him from Europe.

Listening, I tipped against Poppa (he had refused to walk up, look at her). He bent forward clutching the tasseled vellum program that Shirl’s husband had got printed fast and special. It was quality, like the keepsake leaflets passed out at graduations.

Pop kept studying the Order of Worship. Then he groaned loud enough for others to hear. Did it so noisy that three folks (fancy friends of the husband’s family) half turned, strict. I didn’t know what’d hit him. He rocked now, frowning, shaking his ragged head side to side. He reached out and caught my hand—its palm now worn nearbout as leathery as his. Holding on, he was hurting my knuckles. I saw how, across his fist’s back, among
the pretty pinkish freckles, new brown age spots had creeped, lording it over boyhood speckles. Finally he let aloose but only to mash two big mitts over his either ear. Then I knew. Then I heard four-hundred-odd voices, every throat but our two go: “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the House of the Lord forever.”

AT TIMES
, I still wonder why I picked to speak like this and not the way Momma wanted, full of quotes, rich with a tense for each tense occasion. My husband’s grammar was a good bit better than my own and he never let me forget it, neither. Got where my children (their grandma’s pets) ofttimes scolded me for talking like some hick. My oldests griped they felt ashamed to bring home fancier friends from school. Especially little pals from Summit Avenue’s best end.—I think of poor Momma—dead so long now. But every time I commit Ain’t again, I feel her spinning like a wood lathe in her crypt. And, times, I do feel bashful about certain slips. I know I ain’t even consistent in my being wrong. But, Lord knows, it’s too late for me to try and get it letter-perfect now. Crude as I may sometimes sound to others—I understand what I mean. And I always did know this much, darling:

GRAMMAR’S
just a way of talking about something else.

WHEN
Lou, my own girl, got up around nine, a serious reader, she found this grownup book where some young fellow, desperate and broke, jumps off a high bridge over frozen river. The book said, “Then Gerald took his own life.” Well, Lou admired that phrase, new to her. She repeated it out loud three times. I was settled beside her on
our
porch swing (I’d got the model just like my late poppa’s). I sat shelling butter beans. It was raining out and all my children had been forced to play on the porch. Lou—a patient, sometimes gloomy child, full of methods—she reached into my colander loaded with green, lifted my pink right hand, turned it over. Lou placed her own gnawed fingernail along a zigzag still printed in my wrist.

Tracing it, she asked, “Did you, Momma? One time, did you try and … ‘take your own life’?”

“No, ma’am,” I said right off. “Tried to double it.”

“What happened?”

“This
did. Because, see, once …” But I’m holding the wrist out and away, turning it side to side, tilting my head, squinting like Momma always did to make me go blurrier and maybe be pretty finally. I sat recalling everything at onct, a crunch and stew
of
pictures: Two little girls in a bath the color their own histories’d be. And especially the nails I’d drove so deep into our favorite female elm, how amber had coated each spike’s head overnight, lumps smooth and sizable as a big man’s pendulum parts, but clear as jewels, nuggets such as only pain can hatch. I sat modeling my scar like some fine lady’s choicest heirloom bangle. “Because, see, once … upon
a time … way back, like the Grimm Brothers say, when wishing still helped, there lived …”

My other children set down their toys and spoons and pebbles quick. Got off floorboards and scurried towards me. What was nice: They won’t doing this to please me. They’d come for selfish reasons. Made me feel good, thinking I had something to tell, after all. My English may be ugly as a mud fence but I know what a story is.

Anything I picked to parade aloud after “Once,” anything true, why my brood would gobble it. Louisa, being sensitive, knew to shut her book. Both my hands kept snapping the beans I’d serve kids later. A fine rain spray blew off our gutters. The street was a fat gray river and our walkway a silver brook. I wanted to offer children my entire messy tale. But I knew: Maybe you can tell kids about grownups’ carryings-on … but never the whole truth about the full range of what other children feel and do. Scares kids too much.

So I winged it. “Once … back when money yet amounted to a hill of beans, when every water fountain in the world still overshot its own drain bowl by a yard at least, when your grandma’s grand piano got tuned twice a year by a blind fellow on contract to buggy clear out from Raleigh, it or no, there lived what might—to anybody not from around here—seem the dullest thing going: two little girls, best friends, in a town where nothing ever happened.”

“That’s
here,”
one twin pointed through porch flooring. “Here,” our other twin puts in. “Well,” says I, “it is and, too, it ain’t.” Then I really got rolling.

Rain kept at it, the day stayed blue and—like this one has—my story drew up to where I might could close it. I felt my audience’s attention span droop a bit but as I sneaked up on the famous words “The End,” it come to me—it might not. Ever end.

My young ones would get some size and years and seasoning on them and—if I told it right—they might repeat this selfsame tale (plus all their own yarns). Then other kin would tell yet other babies on other porches in far countries and states and maybe even galaxies. Who knew? Woman down the hall says the weather’s so strange now owing to those astronauts blowing up that time. Cameras were on their poor relatives, staring overhead. But I fancied blond children living long enough to rattle this to
their
big-eared little pitchers—on and on, a ocean of waves each cresting Once, Once, Once …

“Once, in the earth days, in a tale my great-great-grandma weaned others on, there lived two little girls, innocent as anybody gets to be, bored as possible, liking each other too much to stay legal in a town where nothing ever happened but what you got to go on in your own head and heart and, sure, your knickers.—So, one fine morning, these children, wrists bleeding on the sheets, commenced chanting a pet rhyme and bounding on their beds. Once, two …”