Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

  He now offered to give me the first hoist up. He laced his fingers and knelt, stiff arms V-ed before me. Touching his shoulders, I stepped up. His powerful palms joined, toughened, under my sole. And just the feel of my weight swung in young Wade’s fine hands, it gave me a sudden twinge. “Oooh,” I said, old enough to act right trashy for a change. “Oh, honey, but all them sinews feels so good.” He laughed, breath on my leg. “Two, three …” And then I was up. Heavenly breeze.

  Hadn’t been inside of a tree for years, tens of years. Leaves of years and time. Felt like being let in some temple/home. To arrive high and invisible in the safe hollow of it. Talk of a Child’s Garden of Verses. Here was what a person had, just shy of the flight I’d always longed for. I went on up, slow, but limb for limb, I did him proud. Did me proud. Did Shirley, Cassie, Reba, Maimie Beech, and fearful Momma proud. I really scouted for some cinched spot, traces. It mostly was a smooth-barked good-climbing tree. You didn’t burn your hands too bad.

  “Call me,” Wade hollered due sky, “if there’s a problem or …”

  “Thanks, but I like it. I can see your mill. You’re lucky to have a whole stone mill and all. Must stay cool right along. Your wife pot too?”

  I didn’t listen to his answer. Round flaky logs were underfoot. It being October the big yellow leaves scraped against each other everywhere, looked the size of certificates, like I’d climbed into a courthouseful—the family tree. I thought of hollow African logs, ship’s masts. The potter was trying to chat up my senile husband. Wade asked Cap about his Captain’s uniform. No answer past a belch Caruso could’ve envied. Woodwind.

  Wade had offered to climb for me. I said it was my duty to. I wanted to manage this while I still could. Cap won’t talking. So Wade stole off into the woods a ways to pee—not daring to go far from Cap but worried that I’d see. Young Wade kept checking modestly over his shoulder. From my spot, I could plainly look right down onto it, his pinkish decent standard deal from direct overhead. You know me: I considered whistling a catcall but didn’t. From this high, that stream from Wade looked silver.

  I’d at least drove to this spot. For all the grief the old coot down there had given me, along with good laughs sometimes and the bonus of our own particular godsend kids—this seemed my last offering to him.

  I found one set of branches where the flesh of wood seemed double-scarred. But if this was where one poor bugle boy tied a mule harness for a goodly swing toward clean pond water, I would never know. I touched the spot for luck anyhow. Soon I’d been in that tree forty minutes. To tell you honest, I was still somewhat of a monkey but not a young monkey.

  Then I did what I been doing throughout this whole told record, child. I took the best facts available and tried making them connect and last and maybe stretch some. I imagined with facts, around them. I did history the favor of believing it literal, meaning I invented some of it! I unbuckled my natural-toned leather belt (ten good dollars last month at a Ekstein’s Finer Women’s Fall Apparel sale). I rubbed it hard against a broad boll. I worked thin leather against coarse wood till heated rawhide frayed then snapped. And now I had a thong stretching fourteen inches. I scraped both sides till it did look old—older than me, if maybe not so old as the vet down there, patient, eager, jaundiced on his back. Odd, the going down was harder and way scarier than my getting up. Ain’t it ever the way? coming down in this life. Was I really up that high and must I now fall?

  The potter jumped when my feet poked free of green.

  Captain had slid off asleep while I ranged up yonder knocking on heaven’s very gate for him. Which pleased then peeved me and I suddenly thought, staring at his peaceful lowered white lashes: He’s dead and gone! Why, oh why should my life have been this one, with this one?

  But warrior’s peepers opened on that same gray I’d fallen for (and into) in 1899 when he flared them off a reviewing stand where the doomed McKinley spoke. How huge these eyes looked under me, like they were the pond that a shot person, seeing he was shot and knowing he was falling into water, would choose to free-fall into. I thought for one second of the canceled color in the blank eyes of our son. “Find?” Cap swallowed hard.

  “Sir? We are in luck!” and I squatted, dangled the thing before him like some prize snake just discovered. Near me, Wade’s sandals took one surprised step back till he saw it had to be my belt.

  I held the thing in air over Captain’s face. He smiled so, the gums long receded but teeth almost eerie in how white and perfect they yet were. He grinned, and it was like Cassie’s dwindling inch of beauty near the eyes, all his charm and sweetness, the full child seemed greenhoused in that rare grin widening beneath me. I admitted, “You’re a darling, in a way.” He didn’t hear me. He held the precious thong between his hands and snapped it. “Good, still good,” he said. I was grinning, stupid, down at his delight. As usual, half ashamed of my rich pleasure. Wade’s dusty feet were good feet waiting like Mick-alangelo statue-feet nearby.

  “They killed Ned,” and Cap pointed back past me, and up. I glanced there and when I turned again, he again yelled “They” at my face but like “They” was my name, honey. He next gently pulled me near his mouth framed in its white mustache and the mouth said, simply, and with force, but only for my ears and lucid as anything, “You never have been enough, but … thank you.” Tears sprung in my eyes, furious. But he seemed to pull me down for one quick kiss, him making up like always, and I was just compiling a long list of wounded comebacks when I saw these pieces of fabric floating between his face and mine. Then I felt a sort of brace around my collarbone and only slow did I understand how cleverly he’d got the thong behind my neck and then up under it. I understood how powerful his hands still were in cutting off the wind. My wind. First you feel embarrassment at Wade’s seeing and then you think I better stop this anyhow and then you hear a hiss like prolonged jingle bells, which is blood ringing early warning in your either ear. Next you feel the gristle in your neck creak like a tested door lock before the full word “strangled” hits. “Closed Creatively.” Thumbs pressing so and from directly underneath. “They!” he called like warning others off from me. “THEY!”

  When I sensed the world was turning yellow and now gone spotted with red enameled daubed over that yellow—when I found that I did miss having my air in personal savings where I could control it, my legs shot straight out, and I tried beating him. I give it everything I owned. Child, all’s fair in love and war and I had him on both counts. But a life of strength seemed saved in him. He was Savings and had been, I was Checking and too I was checking out. You are face to face, eyes working good enough to see the huge gray eyes below you—merry—noticing your tone declining into Northern blue, and it is Satan’s own shit-eating grin. Excuse my language.

  “Mrs.… is this a … family? … I mean should I maybe?” And I give a sound like a rabbit run over by a Model T and the potter was stooping on and around and over us, was working to dislodge my recent belt and maybe please pry Captain’s mitts from off my general neck area please. I finally rolled free and gasped, so glad, both hands massaging my bashed windpipe. I tossed my own head back hard onto rocky soil to try and knock some wind deep into me. I heard Cap then get young Wade by the throat. And I was looking at the sycamore above me. A struggle nearby. How beautiful its yellow leaves. Just as I heard “They’re loose!”, out I passed.

  I woke in the jeep. Cap slumped over in our car. How still everything was, just one mockingbird’s song, highway noise far off. The potter who’d saved my life, he’d been busy tying up my husband—hog-tying him this go-round to our front seat. The boy, neck ruddied, stood pouring Cocola into a pretty handmade mug, goldfish brushed in glazes on its sides. I admired the fish a while before he saw I was awake.

  “I knew you were okay. I checked your Vital signs,’ as they say do. I considered the hospital. I secured him. Unbelievable. Your neck is cut in back, you feel that? Never saw such strength, what possessed him? Did he know what he was doing to you?”

/>   “When?” I asked.

  2

  I DROVE home quick. I didn’t stop at the roadside weeds for his bathroom requirements. I knew that onct I untied the man, he’d maybe dive at me again. Instead I let him soil hisself. I’d just open the window. I’d pretty much had it by now. I trust you won’t think me hard-hearted Hannah, but I’d hoped to wheel past Louisa’s garden apartment on the drive home. I hated his spoiling that: “Guess where we been?”, I’d wanted to phone Lou. Driving, I considered her and her life in Newport News. I had always enjoyed imagining what a perfect mother our Louisa would make (way more natural at it than I’d ever been with all my edginess, my pointless extra, slowing thoughts). Now Lou lived alone—kept her place’s white area rugs perfect, was devoted to three girlfriends, two always trying and lose weight and one forever trying to gain, and, in my opinion, they talked about it too much, weight. Their big thrill was getting dressed to the gills and going out to Friday night restaurants. Flirting with waiters, making a four-way pact to sigh at him a lot but finally to always go home as a group. If Lou had been in love with one of these other lady un-beauties—respected wonderful people like her—I would have been real pleased, I swear I would. Instead she had a dog named Moxie in honor of Ned’s first and she talked about the dog mostly and her work. I had hoped for another Madame Curie. Heck, I’d have settled for Miss Greer Garson as Madame Curie. To my mind, honey, I do not believe that being a virgin at sixty argues a wasted life—no. But here was our Louisa, who, like Winona, could’ve done any job on earth—ambassador, you name it. Me too, I would add my modest self to this list. Lou’s life seemed a trifle hollow to me—just not enough to it for a person as sturdy and worthy as my adored and secret favorite. I wanted everything for her. I felt like I’d been planning that. I felt I could.

  I had lots of time to think during that trip home. I couldn’t bear to focus on the ex-hog dealer hog-tied to the Chevy’s seat beside me. I took my choicest energies to thoughts of my children, ours.

  Onct home, I need not tell you he required considerable restraining at first. The new doctor in town put Cap on tranquilizers, then he just swabbed my cut neck with rubbing alcohol and docked us forty-two bucks. No comment.

  I missed Doc Collier with the lovely speaking voice, though I wondered if his being, like we found out later, a addict had hurt his treatment of my child I’d brung Doc at such a gallop. Who knows? Back home, I would stride in and look at the bearded one tied to the bed, the four-poster where everything had started and would probably end. He was irritating as a bad child, huge in adult power, irksome to consider as this wife’s only likely future. (I made a mental note: Send Wade a Xmas card.)

  Castalia’s presence seemed to calm him. But as always, I kept wondering: What was in it for her? Otherwise he brayed sometimes and when I stepped in to check he’d get pop-eyed, yelling, “Sal, Ned, duck—it’s them, Them!” Hurt a person’s feelings at times.

  “For God’s sake, I was born a hundred and ten feet from here and south of this spot, so just pipe down, you old fool, Lucy ain’t turnt Yankee yet.” Then I’d come over and comb his beard, which soothed him but not as much as Cassie’s being in the house. Others stayed away. Word was out—the young doctor gossiped, I was sure of it—unlike dear hooked Collier and his dear hooked nurse. Folks knew my man had nearbout succeeded in choking me and so the high school journalism students soon shied away. A warrior of antique fame was one thing, a wife strangler another. For me such differences had long since blurred, child. (I got to say this, in case you’re wondering or have wondered: There were only two divorced women in Falls then, one was Lolly and the other a very loose waitress. Won’t done then, and I obviously was not the leaving type. Obviously.)

  Castalia came with leftovers, feeding these to us and not her minks. “Folks say he try and kill you. Someway I wishing hadn’t nobody heard. I don’t want our news all up and down these streets.” Her saying “our” pleased me so.

  But I told her what was worse, way harder than these marks around my neck. I said how before he tried to do me in, he’d said … said …

  She stood, took her coat off, laying it careful over the living-room couch. “What he say you that so bad?” She settled beside me.

  Though alone with her, though he was silent down the hall (untied by Cassie in honor of her visit, since only she was big and strong enough to “handle” him), I still whispered, “He said, ‘You were never enough, but thank you.’”

  “Whoo,” she gave a barricaded smile. “They can do it, can’t they? But, Lucy honey, we gots to consider the source. Look around you at these men. Ain’t never had to axe theyselfs one real question. They start out, they a little boy baby with a congratulations in they didies. They don’t got to wonder much (like us). They start out like being a state-ment. They never gots to question nothing. Gliding, like. They born—they name’s already signed down at the bottom of the deed. But, Lucy? They the real losers. Those of us as had to start everything for ourselfs, as has woke up every day with questions right in the bed with us—’how to get through it,’ ‘why to get through it’—we done turned ourselves flat into somebody. We our own best answers, we a tribe of answers—we self-made.”

  “But it’s so tir-ing, honey, always reinventing the wheel, at the bottom of every blooming hill!”

  She laughed, “That do point that out. But they tells me: we gone inherit Mother Earth, us meek. Well, semi-meek. Men like yours, like ours in yonder, why they ain’t punished for they sins to others—they punished by they sins. Some justice in this world! He usually stay tied up, he done lost his mind, and us? why, we free. I free, you free, he all troubled in the spirits.”

  “Yeah. Free. Free to go shell the butter beans for supper.”

  “Or not to, far that go.”

  I went off then to check on him. I left her going through today’s Herald Traveler (just a weekly now, no “Society Comings and Goings,” mostly newsservice stories, mall ads, a few Boy Scout advances, the crowning of the new Miss Falls, which always sounded to me like “misfire”). Cassie rested there, at home in our house, humming nothing, humming hymns and hits and a sweet smudge of hit hymns.

  He seemed calm, chewing on something. “What’ve you got in your mouth, spit it out.” It was a nightshirt button, it’d been a nightshirt button, nearly mawled to powder now. I wiped his tongue with the bedspread. “You be a good boy, hear?” I looked back, sun gleaming on his fine brass scabbard and giving one patch of wallpaper sudden value.

  Everything suddenly felt fine. Cas and me adjourned to the kitchen and did shell the beans. Canned ones tastes like tin.

  While we ate beans and fatback and collards, and cholesterol be damned, I started worrying. Got a crawling on the neck. I set some aside to feed him when she left. “Too quiet, don’t like it, best go check on our favorite. Be right back.” I left her to eat the rest.

  I’ll never outlive that walk down our hall, the hall I’ve strode ten million times, I bet. Sunlight was all but faded. Some children were setting off firecrackers on our vacant lot. I reached for his room’s light switch, I heard a grunt, a heaving swing.

  The light bulb seemed brighter than ever before. The room smelled of human filth. I saw he’d pulled the bedpan up onto the bed and that he’d smeared mess all over a rug there. But as I stepped nearer, as he kind of smiled at me like some boy child pleased in being caught at manly mischief, I saw what he had done.

  Child? He’d got her coat. He’d smeared each inch of it with his own yellow stool. Her coat covered our bed—the bed where we’d conceived our children, the bed that’d sheltered his stored guns—a bed hung yet with his war gear.

  “Willie,” I said. “What have you gone and done to us, son? Explain.”

  He crouched over the thing, grinning, some double-daring bulldog in a manger. Seemed if he couldn’t have this, her best, our best, everybody’s, then nobody could. He squatted heavy on it, kneeling. His nightshirt was hiked up around his fine-skinned white white hips, and
as I moved nearer, my arms out far beside me for needed balance like I was walking some wire above Niagara, I saw that he had got his old male self in hand, he’d got it up and functioning (old habits do die hard). And—on his knees in our bed—he’d just shot a lightning bolt of pearly seed across Castalia’s prized, named minks.

  The coat was matted, ruined permanent. He’d made sure. Even at quarter-speed, he had enough destruction left in him to be real thorough.

  He eased back onto haunches. The grin was what just killed me. My first thoughts were of her, how to hide it from her, where I might could find some genius dry cleaners in Raleigh, experts. I would use up all his final money to make this right for Cas. But it was past help, her coat and history. I cannot describe what he had done to it, all over, sug, all over.

  I felt adrenaline bloom inside me like a roaring sudden drug. I felt almost elated in some weird way—strong about how he’d so surprised me. He continually surprised me just when I thought my outrage was all peaked and spent. Now here he’d come up with another crime to add across our son’s eyes, to pile over my own peeled loving life.

  “So,” I said. “You been planning this? or’d it just sneak up on you?—No,” I said then. “You’ve gotten everything but this she grew from scratch for her own self. And this, you see, we needed, Willie. You can’t have this.”

  He smiled like some man at a party who’s just said the tip-toppest wisecrack and is unbeatable and clever and knows it all. Nothing of my own was left worth vandalizing, but hers?

  “It’s useless now,” I said, praying she’d keep eating. “It’s useless to anybody now but, on principle, I think I’ll be wanting that back. Give me it.”