Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (93 page)

And on, so much to tell before “The End.”

The end, no fair how soon its cowcatcher strikes us all. Shirley went at nineteen when I was nineteen. Momma was fifty-two when her turn came: I’d just turned thirty-two. Poppa stopped at fifty-eight, and me, I was thirty-six. My husband lived till ninety-two, me then fifty-some. And, oh yes, don’t let me leave out my aunts, please, darling. I was in my middle forties when they drifted off—in a group, like always. They were old after all. You expect people to die. You should, I reckon. It’s supposed to be natural and all and you’re considered wise to say that you accept dying. Fact. But, honey, lots of ways, it still seems right weird to me. Not to mention: Unfair.

Now all my assistants in the telling, my little witnesses, they’re flat gone. Not you, though. Many thanks. And me? Well—all my friends are new friends. I’ve got to start the whole thing over every time any story wants saying out. They still do. Yet twitching a mite. As for the telling, darling, I reckon
somebody’s
got to.

So, see? child, it ain’t over yet. Nope.

Ain’t, ain’t, ain’t, and amen.

B
EWARE
of feeling sorry for yourself. It’s mighty tempting. Private Marsden, still a kid, sat slumped—filthy—by a ditch near Appomattox. He held a jar. He was trapping bees in it. One musket rested across his lap. It’d killed three people (with his help). The boy kept crying but no longer noticed doing so. Four thousand other ragged fellows rested here in open countryside. All were Southern, most seemed stunned by being called “non-victors” after so much work. They now waited to see Lee. Lee and his horse would soon trot by here. Rumor claimed he would sign away Reb soldiers’ rights today. Boil a whole document down to one word: “Uncle.”

Some vets stood balanced betwixt homemade crutches, forked saplings. The seriously wounded laid on pallets. They asked friends: If and when the godlike Lee passed, could their pallets’ head ends be propped up so they might see, please?

The best talker in each platoon kept slinking off to one side, preparing a speech meant to buck up friends and the humbled Lee. Our mighty hath sure fallen. “SOUTH LOSES IT.” How would all these fellows get home, child? Nobody knew how to behave.

Where
is
a soldier when his war gets yanked out from under him? Not yet a ripe civilian but not quite military, either. He is some type of Milquetoast or pirate caught betwixt. Unscrubbed Rebels played cards, dawdled, built fires just for the comfort of doing that. Most sat still, looking at each other or nowhere. Poker run quieter than usual. Willie set his bees aside and, unnoticed by others, placed his empty musket in a roadside ditch.
Solemn, he scooped loose clay over it. He cried like he was burying some dear old household pet. He would rather let his out-of-ammo weapon rest in peace than have it claimed by Northern hands and shown up yonder as “captured armament.” Once he’d sprinkled dried grasses overtop, Will turned back to busywork, bee gathering. He was fifteen. There’d been this empty mustard jar by the roadside, there’d been all these clover-loving bees, wasps, yellowjackets.

Sal Smith and other cardplayers today acted edgy. They were like some sawmill crew the morning their foreman is sick: Workers arrive to find the whole plant locked. Everybody mopes around outside its gate. Should they run off or stay put, getting credit for the hours they’ve already waited? Men find, by noon, they’re really missing their loud splintery jobs. They love their work, cut off from it. Even war, people really get used to.

Wee Willie Marsden had fought on the losing side. Darling? it sure showed. His knee had healed, leaving only a livid purple scar. By now, his boots and the mud inside his boots all felt like boots to him. His pal’s footgear still dangled from his belt but the soles were missing. Over one shoulder a bugle rode its red cord, mud-crusted. He wore a man-sized sword around his waist. Gray britches were gummed across with sticky seeds, cockleburs, and mildew from his lying in a ditch these months—face-down—eyes trailed along the sight of a musket, empty since February. His striped shirt was a civilian one. This old lady in Roanoke had pitied the boy his sleeveless tunic. Seeing him march by, she snatched this off her clothesline, passed it to him over her back fence. He seemed confused. “For you, the youngest one,” she said as other men around him laughed. Will had doubted her goodwill. His being picked surprised him. He’d felt invisible and old. His musket had been useful lately either as a cane or just as something he’d got used to holding. Where
was
that thing?—he couldn’t quite decide—oh, yeah, he’d buried it just now. Yeah. It, at least, was safe.

Sal Smith had somehow lived through everything. The longer Salvador Magellan lasted, the deeper blue were circles under trusting eyes, the redder and more oakum-stiff did his hair look. Now him and others loitered near this road, bent toward cards, admitting they worried about starting over as farmers, as clerks. Off in New Bern, Sal’s twin boys were commencing to talk. He’d never seen them. The absconding Chinese tailor and that flashy local matron had, so far, failed to send along a Florida address.

Will listened to others wonder how it’d be—returning to their civvy jobs. Curled off to one side, Will felt: He hadn’t really
been
anything before finding himself a soldier. Nothing but a child. And he sure couldn’t go back to being that.

The fellow whose farmhouse had been picked as the location for today’s signing, he’d surely fallen afoul of luck. Rumor had it, his
first
farm got caught ambushed by First Bull Run up near Washington. So he’d upped and sold his bullet-riddled barns, moved deep into the sleepiest available Virginia. To Appomattox.

Willie studied captured bees. He’d stayed at least this much a kid. Numb, he held the clear jar up against sky, he played like these bugs had chose to stay (renters) in this particular plug of blue. How they battered, trying to work free. Nearby, another Reb sat whittling one little spread-eagled woman from a forked branch. She was mostly open white thighs. “Bessie,” the man held up his masterpiece. “Bessie, spread ‘em, pride of my pride, because here Poppa comes.” Others laughed but sounded a tad spiritless. This runt had been carving open homecoming thighs since two weeks after Sumter.

The platoon’s orator stood off behind some pokeberry shrubs, talking to hisself and trying hand gestures. “Sir? Saint and Genius, our sacrificial … something … genius.” His words drifted as he checked over his shoulder, guilty. The speaker hoped to stir both Lee and these beloved hungry comrades, the kids and louts he’d fought beside these many years. Almost forever, it seemed. That was the weird part. These fellows might’ve been sired in these ranks, birthed in foxholes—literally sons of guns.

Fires won’t needed in April but many burned along this road. Fires and horses,
they
, at least, would never have to know we lost.

“Where
is
he?” Sal stood, craned over the heads of thousands milling near the road that led to one farm outside Appomattox Court House. In the distance, one trace of dust lifted. Nearer, a few pallets’ ends were being hoisted onto ditchside stones. “You know he’s punctual as any man on earth. If anything, he’ll get there earlier’n Grant, you watch.” Sal, cooling his face with a fan of playing cards, resettled and said, “Oh, fighting dirty? Well, I’ll see you and raise you, you sly dog.” Poker won’t being played for money now. None around. Unshaved recruits used fistfuls of promissory pay chits. Each slip said this’d definitely be made good by our Confederate Treasury. There won’t one, but men used chits anyhow. Made your poker seem to matter more. All a game anyway—the whole four years’ worth, somebody had to win, somebody had to … the other.

Sal kept checking on little Marsden, slouchy upon the crest of the low hill. Marsden sat cross-legged. In one hand, a jar of bugs, in the other a fine gold pocket watch he kept opening to hear chime. Boy’s eyes were closed as he cupped the metal timepiece to his left ear, as he pressed mason jar to his right. Will looked browned or grayed, no longer plump and shrimp-tender but—from living in the open—parchmenty like some old-timer. Quietly, the boy was crying in a hapless kind of way. It bothered those gents that noticed. Cardplayers sometimes checked in Will’s direction. Some glances seemed to say, “Grow the hell up.” Others, like Sal’s, hinted, “Me, too, mostly.”

Will kept naming bees, kept losing track of which he’d named so far. Before burying his musket, he had used its detached bayonet to jab nice air holes in a jar’s tin lid. Careful, he now undid the thing, he slipped in clover for bees’ comfort, their civilian furniture.

“Something’s coming,” one sergeant called.

Others yet half listened for the old sounds: cannon rumble, thunder
man-made. Instead, birds kept singing from the thicket close by. Where had loud birds
been
these last four years? Hiding in vacation trees of border states? Now they sure let rip, songs sent straight up—almost taunting, like they approved the Bluebelly Sapsuckers carrying off top prize. Cardinals, mockingbirds, turncoats.

“Somebody pretty big-brass bound our way from the look of what the crowd’s doing.”

Fellows stood and stretched, like waking. The whittler had just peeled dark-bark knickers off yet another innocent forked branch. “Sister to Bessie—she’ll wrap them pudding thighs around you, squeeze you half to death, and you’ll feel Sherman’s fire but where you’ll love it, hotshots. Melt your miniés! Look at the size of the thighs on
this
’un.” Nobody looked. Somebody said, “Grow up, loser.” It was noon. You felt sick from hunger, numbness, and the dullness of these mortal un-winners you had fought alongside too long. How perfect daylight looked. Paint. Nothing else bad could ever happen again to the person, could it? A fellow just wanted to go hide inside a smooth wallpapered room and then look out some clean window when he woke. First a man might sleep one solid year, then the smell of homemade flapjacks floating in pooled clover honey, that’d wake him, plus the sound of some live tolerable not-half-bad-looking woman humming a hymn or ditty down the hall, the smell of maintained linen—the lady’s personally, and this bed’s—that’d cocoon you in hard-earned middle-class delights. Surely that won’t much to ask, plus some bacon cooking maybe? Could the losing side expect so much? Would the losers’ women cut them off love-wise for losing it so bad?
Would
home let you back in?

Sal, dealing a last hand, watched Will not even know that Will was crying. Will probably considered it just Confederate
thinking
.

Some wag climbed (and ruined) a young maple as he hollered, “Dust getting nearer, might be Lee. Best get ready, just in case. Wouldn’t want to get caught playing cards and miss this, would you?” The whole poker match rose then, stepped closer to the place, claimed certain choicer spots. You saw how others from other platoons were also lining up with a certain fuss. Men on crutches now crossed the road, but in that shy quick way people jaywalk between floats in a parade.

Those on pallets complained about the many legs now blocking their view. The wood carver set the twin thighs upon a mat of leaves like some kid putting dolls to bed, “Don’t go noplace now. I thigh for you.” Nobody laughed. They’d heard it. They’d heard everything before. In the grove, clearing his throat, the orator went, “On behalf of myself and others, sir, perhaps a few remarks are in order, sir, considering the momentous …”

Willie turned his back on such commotion. It was him here and the clover and the bee wings fraying their rare film against the glass. Plus a ticking from one excellent German watch. Boy closed his eyes. He’d pretty much had it. The jar’s cool side he rolled against his forehead, he forgot to wipe his streaming eyes and nose. Too tired to feel ashamed, he sat face-up
toward a peaceable sun.
We lost it. I cannot be seen. I will have to live hid the rest of my whole life and I’m not all that old yet, numbers-wise
.

On the road below, Southern voices churred like bees’ wings eager to get loose, to go hive on home. Will should want that, too. Shouldn’t he be missing something? Somebody, maybe? Squeeze that trigger like it’s everything you love. You do—as a gentleman—love something, right? Food. Food maybe? With food’s help, he’d aim due south, he’d ask directions on the way. He knew who probably waited—the widowed Momma, that ninety-pound overload of silk and charm. Maybe with Castalia taking care of Momma yet. He knew who did not wait—most of Momma’s sixty-one slaves, including all their babies.

“Will? Come here, saved a excellent spot for you. Lee, boy, Lee coming.”

Will sure had slept on the ground of many states lately. Some days it rained all day but that changed nothing. You still fought. They still came at you. His voice had lately dropped in fits and peeps while, underneath gray worsted, other unasked-for changes started threatening. To kill a person (several) before you’ve even got a sprig of pubic hair, and to be praised to Heaven for doing that! Yikes.

“Will?
Is
Lee, I’m told. Best get your young butt in motion and on down here. He’s no more’n a eighth of a mile off, look alive.—Will? ‘Why does the ocean stay so mad?’ Little joke, boy, why?”

Now, listening to his bees like for smart gypsy advice, holding the cool watch closer like some pet, Will heard hoofbeats gathering and couldn’t for the life of him remember the answer to Sal’s corny riddle, or just
why
he’d gone and shot three whole other fellows. The “how” part stayed way too clear, every inch and droplet of it did. But the “why,” way less.

Maybe Lee could tell him. As if Lee had a human moment for any soldier shy of colonel!

Sal was sounding seriously miffed. “I got to come up there and drag you down here and lose
both
our spots? Or what? It’s important, it’s our commander. All over but the shouting, so come shout some. One last Rebel yell while we’re still
called
Rebs.”