Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (95 page)

“I am, better. It’s over. Well …”

“The worst thing is—Willie, I’ll never know how you look, grown. It kills old Sal to think that he might someday pass you on a street and not even know. You’ll stop me, right? To be strangers on a street after everything we hiked through together—that’s a pisser, ain’t it?”

“I’ll know you,” Will said.
“You’re
not going to get a bit better-looking,” and he punched Sal hard. They hugged each other—determined not to cry now they’d seen Lee do it—to protect Lee, by not.

“Sal, I hate asking: but which way’s due south?”

Smith pointed, “That’s it. You ain’t due much else.”

Then Marsden backed away. You can’t believe you get to walk off from those many others. Free. But Will straightened all the gear strapped to him, evening its weight. He cut through stranger soldiers on the road’s far side, he stepped into the sedge grass of the field there. “Don’t go away mad,” the wood carver hollered, dancing two wooden female lower bodies. Will saw that Sal—in what looked from the back like a lover’s fit of pique—had stomped off into the pokeberry bushes, hiding from the sight.

Then Will just walked.

Others watched his progress. It was steady. You could see he’d planned this for a while. They had offered the lad usual parting words. They knew him as arm gestures backing up a perfect singing voice, they knew him as
the poorest bugler on either side of the War of Northern Aggression, then they knew him a groom and then a marksman who’d scored a fair amount of hits and who’d chose, they decided, to loot at least one little victim. They knew his family’s name, one of the twenty flashiest in North Carolina, easy. Now—idle—they watched him stroll off, determined, bound Home.

To him they’d said nothing better than “Never do nothing I wouldn’t if I got the chance.” “Have yourself the fine long life you’ve earned, son.” “Don’t take any wooden Confederate nickels or, for that matter, Reb metal ones.” “Listen here, pup, my advice’d be: try and keep it in your pants, hear?”

Goodbyes are never excellent enough.

WILL
started out on foot. So simple his stumbling forward, a determined trot that saddened men to see. They knew he’d known as little food as they had lately. They knew his being fifteen helped him find this sudden needed spunk—must be coming out of sinew, a backlog used to get the heck out of here. How young he still looked—from behind at least—and after all of this! Men saw him try and keep his every step aimed south as possible. He had his buddy’s boots yet dangling around his waist, one outsized sword and scabbard, his pal’s brass horn on its grimy tasseled cord. He had, at his waist, a jar of bees that nobody’d mentioned or asked about. Superstition maybe, or childhood? Early on, he’d collected and abandoned many museum-worthy rock crystals in three years. But these had been left buried careful among various ditches.

Ten minutes later the kid chose to turn back, planning to wave gloriously at friends. But when he turned, Will found he could hardly see the ridge road now. Vets were just a thin line. Men he’d known were only part of a grainy stripe, now as gray as their uniforms and not the rosy tint of the faces in it. At the front of this line, Will saw a hand-sized bit of dust lifting. Must be Lee, slowed by all them tribute hats, Lee headed where he must.

And so the child soldier waved anyhow, even knowing he could not be seen. “Bye, mess.” He turned and walked some more, walked hard as he could go. He ran some, clanking with gear and glass. The field was deep in gummy mud. You had to lift each boot quite high to make a decent step. Every step became its own decision.

TO HEAR
him tell it later (and you have to trust the person by then)—while he tramped south, not rightly knowing much about southeast or southwest, just using for his guide the sides of trees opposite their mossy flanks, while he took it a day at a time, begging and stopping for handouts at ladies’ back porches, his body started changing on him. Female voices were even more beautiful than he’d recalled. Did they help him change? These ladies asked if he’d known their soldier sons or sons-in-law or brothers, husbands. He met many women who spilled long breathless lists of names, names he sometimes
did
know and sometimes knew were dead and gone or bad hurt,
but he never admitted that. Let others bear such awful news. He had plenty of his own and planned to keep it to hisself.

Instead Will ate what he was offered, stayed still, trusted word to follow. Willie—being among the first returning soldiers to walk past farms and through small towns—got a bit more pie and attention than would the next ninety thousand.

He grew more superstitious. Bees in the jar kept dying and he felt he had to stop at some clover and catch more. He told hisself that if the bees kept living in the jar, he’d get home—they hummed and helped, a supplement heart. And he was collecting bees when he heard a train whistle and here came a southbound freight moving slower than a walking man because the thing was covered with vets. Even the locomotive was piled with homebound Johnny Rebs, wearing bandannas to make breathing easier in the blowing soot. Every inch of roof, vestibules, and couplings seemed mosaicked with limbs and hats and gray cloth. Grant—at Lee’s urging—made transport on any train free to any now unsalaried Southern soldier. Several vets were urinating off the caboose roof, their wetness struck near a ditch bank where a boy, acting ashamed of doing so, sat trapping bees. Men looked at Will, he stared at them. Nobody recognized him. He seemed to fear them, as if everybody grownup on earth was a Yankee. The hunger put a fuzz on some things, hurt you with the bald brightness of others. There was a scent, too. Call it puberty. Say he had been on the road less than three weeks, he had been sleeping in haystacks and farm-gear shanties when this started happening to our Willie M.: the lad commenced to truly sideshow
growing!

One sign was, to be blunt, his gentleman’s bauble stayed perpetual on guard—which might (what with his outgrown trousers) explain why passersby avoided him. Seemed his body’d waited for a truce. You don’t want to bother expanding till you know the feeble organism gets to really live through present jeopardy—just good business practice, really. Now it decided to enlarge.

He was walking in the post road’s dust when he slowed, seeing how his own pant cuffs seemed to be splitting from the bottoms up. Pant tubes seized now at his own widening gristled calves. Will noticed how tanned ankles showed a whole inch and a half of skin—burned raw by everyday sun.

Slow, he understood he had grown that much, this fast. It scared him—weeks back, Sal had said, you’ll change and I won’t know you. Willie hadn’t quite believed this. Now he understood. He had no mirrors handy to gauge if his face was lengthening like his wrists and shanks were. He got even more superstitious than during the Great Struggle. Example being, he felt sure, child, that if he walked back north—he would shrink into the little boy he’d been, mile by centimeter smaller, smoother, less a bristled goat and more the sleek young fawn he’d been.

It happens to some boys all in one early summer. They’ll get the majority
of their adult inches, they’ll go weedy-rangy and then dense, all in one most haywire mighty upshot. These boys sometimes feel right dizzy during this. Their joints ache from expanding like a pregnant woman’s pelvis bones will, such radical unlatching, but with boys it’s all over. Boys then sure do fall down a lot. They will trip over the smallest root, over nothing. They’ve got to nap often and they have to eat about enough for four, minimum.

Considering the increased appetite, growth’s timing sure was hard on Willie Marsden headed home. It being late April, blackberries won’t yet ripely black or even very red. Poor child ate the greenies. If it won’t marked Poisonous, he
would
put it in his mouth and try and chewing. Dandelion leaves sure get old fast. When Willie drew near settlements, he was interested in two things: newspapers—full of details (Grant had let the Rebs take their own horses and mules home)—and food. Every town smelled of frying, baked goods. Your nose and your spit glands were, Will found, first cousins. Downtown, noticeable to strangers as his scent seemed, the kid’s stomach also groused and yodeled. A whole zoo lives, secret, in your lower body, waiting to go ape-noisy if deprived. Will held one palm to his tummy and another over his mouth when people passed. Spittle sprung out near a bakery. Uh-oh.

He knew something was really wrong when—unable not to—he stole three cooling hunks of shortbread off the windowsill of one Virginia matron. Will had been about to knock and ask for free food when he saw these buttery things. He knew that, at best, he would only get a smidgen and just of one. That would not do. He grabbed the three and ran and jumped behind a large blooming hydrangea bush and sat there, wolfing, trying to keep his loud groans quiet as he could. Every time he ate, he felt faint from how much blood his new erection hogged. His brain had competition now, below.

“Gypsies!” he finally heard a lady’s shriek. “Or else Yankees or else gypsy Yankees. What could be lower? Here we lose our war plus my first peacetime all-butter shortbread to such vermin. Hattie, run call the sheriff!”

He bolted for the woods and then stood there, confused, laughing. Years later, he forced his wife, who I am, to try and work out a recipe for Scottish shortbread that’d equal the taste of that snitched stuff, pure gold. He claimed nothing that’d ever gone into his mouth since came near it—except he said, lovely lovey-dovey, except maybe portions of honeymoon me. The rogue and liar. I worked and worked but—though my own homespun recipe won the state-fair blue ribbon seven years running, count them—for him, it won’t the same. I finally told my big old quilted bellied man, grown, overgrown, “You’ll never find the jolt shortbread gave you because you’d have to steal it, and get a war to be the meal’s first course. And you’ll never again be that hungry, sir.”

“God willing,” he laughed. “I ate bark off trees. Ate clay from clay banks like our black folks do. Saw a dog being fed one night, coon dog. I threw rocks into the shrubs beyond the dog and when he ran in there, barking, I got right down to his dish. It was leftover stew gone just a little gamy.
Mighty fine. Boy, was he ever mad. Nice thing was, he could never
explain
to his owners, beyond barking, naturally.”

When my Willie departed Appomattox roadside, he had stood five five/six, in there. Captain swore to me later how—by the time he finally planted his bleeding feet onto the turf of the Lilacs seven weeks later (I hope I ain’t blowing the story’s suspense, child, but in order to marry me thirty some years later, he had to at least get back home)—the young civilian stood six feet one and every long bone in him was throbbing—not knowing what’d stretched it so. So much quick growing made him pant.

Springing up that quick is way better if, say, you’re a rich boy working at the country club as a lifeguard, say, during the summer your inches come upon you like a angel visit and a seizure both. That way, you can drink gallons of milk and sit in sun and be admired and sleepy, bronzing in plain view, tripling like somebody’s good stock.

But try walking through two states—not wanting to hock your buddy’s bugle or your victim’s pocket watch or your own sword with the real gold hilt.

Will Marsden, bound most duly south, found a splendid walking stick, five foot high and twisted with hardship and authority. He used it like Moses used his—minus the ability to turn it into snakes. Folks seeing him in his dingy state, growing shaggier each day and with his clothes less likely to cover the increasing amount of him, folks moved to the road’s far side. His uniform (what was left of it) drew a nod from them at first—but when the hordes from Appomattox and elsewhere overtook him in their getting home, folks looked right through him. They had woes and troubles of their own. They could catch a whiff of their own losing side—plus the scent of a young man who’d grown considerable since last bathing. They moved away from Willie, who was grinning, hoping to be liked.

Sometimes the pilgrim would make half a day’s progress and find he had got turned around, was headed north. Then he’d run hard south a ways like north was a magnet that a fellow had to most boldly fight. Years later, looking back he’d see that, hatless, it’d been sunstroke that’d helped to make him addled by day and sick come night. Night shakes—hidden behind others’ sheds—vaguely recalling the scripture where the wandering son plans going home to Daddy and saying that even your servants live better than I have here lately, take me back. But
had
his father’s servants?

Confusing at midday to walk into strange crowded little towns. People stared at first and then—when all towns teemed with ex-Rebs taking breaks in their journeys—nobody noticed. Once Will passed a cotton mill on fire. He had been walking since dawn and it was eighty-five degrees at 6 a.m. Now—a volunteer bucket brigade and the sight of a building burning in this kind of heat made a healthy person feel real thirsty, pretty ill. Somebody yelled that he should set his stick down and he should get in line, help. Marsden did both, he felt glad to be included in a group again. Suddenly living alone like this had been a kind of torture. He understood how much
it helped, whining
to
somebody. Now, stunned, when folks passed a first tin pail his way, Will smiled to those in each direction, thanked everybody, lifted the thing, and drank down a good part of the water in it. Citizens were swearing at him then, they pointed to the city’s southmost limit. “Get, madman.” He took up his staff then and, clinking like a traveling hawker, jar against sword against boots against jangling watch chain, walked where they had shown him to—the burning building crackling at his back.

Odder stuff went on: Two hummingbirds decided to measure him. He said one minute he was standing in the road looking back at a town marked by its great bookmark of black cloud, the next two ruby-throated things appeared before his face—aloft without even trying. Their beaks were pointed sharp as awls, their wings moving so fast wings made five o’clock shadows on the shimmering noon air, such glinting bodies seemed the work of jewelers and made them seem the two most perfect cuff links ever made. Will swore they then zoomed up to the crown of his head—a sort of bird’s “Who goes there?”—and each begun measuring him, buzzing down one inch at a time, one bird to the left, one right—seemed like they were working for some cunning native coffin maker that’d set out two hawkers working on commission. Then birds veered off at right angles into cool blue woods beyond. I don’t usually bust in and say I doubt that something happened. Stranger things’ve happened and why would Captain bother making all this up?