Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

  Alone together sat the Lady victim and her son. They rested, wordless, three, four hours at a stretch. Aristocrats, they were on terms with silence. They’d both grown up on the plantation, so far from anything but its own self, silent, respected, feared. They now felt comforted by the passing clomp of buggy traffic (Saturday was market day for the county’s colored and its white). The Marsdens liked sparrows’ squabbling with happy domestic meanness under boardinghouse eaves. Will sat fooling with his hatband. Lady More Marsden dangled one empty teacup out in air like expecting some slave (freed these several years now) to please come pour, please.

  Fresh home, Marsden worked regular hours. Had to. Was the one way he stayed half held together. Thank God for work! Willie yet owned the timepiece of that Yankee boy he’d plugged. He kept the thing wound and displayed on the mantel of his own rented rooms downtown. Years after Appomattox, Will yet had the gold watch. He claimed that the moment for returning it won’t quite right, North-South mails still unsafe. Fact is, he hated giving it up. Only souvenirs he owned were that and his sword and scabbard, his dead buddy’s bugle, and a twig cut from one pondside tree where the bad thing happened.

  Marsden was both a civilian child and a military grownup. He’d been hardened on each count by what he’d lost. He had only outlived his much-loved Ned by three war years. During that time, Willie’d seen so much, he’d had to hurt so many, the poor fellow got to thinking Ned had been his son!

  That’s how far in advance of your legal age a war can toss you.

  And, oh dear, young William More Marsden remembered everything. Later I understood: a good memory is about one-third cure and two-thirds curse. My own memory, this very one I’m using, is my best handy example. You drop a child into the middle of a battle, he can’t guess at the bigger reasons leading here—like maybe Northern factories vs. Southern farms.

  A child just sees the results. I mean sees them.

  Every passing minié, it’d stuck. That boy’s brain was a savings account with waste in it: times of day, smoke, the whole map, horses lost, names of all his dead. True facts had snagged and abscessed, their sharp ends in. His poor young head was a pincushion calendar.

  If they made my husband walk through one of these new aeroport X-ray machines checking for weaponry? why, just his memory would set it off.

  Weird for 1860

  Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law. I am a stranger in the earth …

  —PSALM 119:18–19

  HOME in Falls—three weeks after the waterhole shooting—Ned’s mother was still mailing her boy long letters. Mostly gossip about nesting habits of her thirty-odd Harz Mountain canaries.

  Telegraph lines were being cut then mended around Richmond. Headquarters favored military dispatches over condolence notes to thousands of civilian mommas. If your boy is dead, finding out a month late is really a type of favor, right? Such runs gents’ logic anyway. I’ll say more later about gents’ logic, where it parts ways with mine. Shortages in Falls meant folks had already tried baking bread with acorn flour. “How’s it taste?” somebody asked concerning the first loaf. “Sort of like,” a taster smacked, staring into space, “… oak.”

  Local children claimed that Ned Smythe’s mother used her back-yard bird feeder to trap sparrows and thrushes. Children swore the widow then chopped up birds’ bodies, fed these to her canaries so they’d sing more larky and free. When I was coming up, kids yet said this about her. Of course, I knew it just won’t true. Still, I pictured it so clear.

  Now I don’t want to say that Winona Smythe, the songbird breeder, was a odd-type person but—fact is—even before her Ned perished in so sad a manner and prior to grief’s taking over, the lady had a knack for seeming the wee-est bit weird. People wondered how Ned—so platinum and mild—had sprung from this stubby grunch of a lady. Bound for school, Ned left a yard where wisteria did what it jolly well pleased, where saplings claimed the lawn. Ned whistled toward Lower Normal, orderly and starched, offering greetings to Falls’ citizens, milkmen included.

  When people inquired about his widowed mom, Ned’d say, “Momma’s never been better, thank you. I’ll mention your asking. Bound to please her.” Folks nodded, guessing just what Winona Smythe might sputter about the idiots and hypocrites in this backward town. She fancied herself a thinker. She’d grown up in Richmond and had never got over it. Some locals claimed she’d been a beauty when arriving here, a bride. Winona had been admired (if at all) for the tininess of her feet and the high number of books she put away. Her boy never seemed to notice the shouting matches his momma sparked in Lucas’ All-Round Store. Winona Smythe, hands on hips, would corner perfect strangers: “And what are you web-footed inbreds gaping at?”

  Ned even shrugged off the neighbors’ petitions every spring. Summit Avenue’s other fancy yards (two colored gardeners apiece) approached azalea season’s ruddy peak. County wagons rattled to and fro before Falls’ great homes—farm folks seemed amazed at everything that money can buy. Winona’s place stunned beauty lovers. Weeds were chest-high. Come 1859, neighbors’ letters again begged Mrs. Smythe to kindly have her lawn mowed “and timbered” (it’d got that bad).

  The woman hadn’t left her tangled yard since Ned marched off to war. All her groceries were delivered. She threw trash into her prissiest neighbors’ yards. Popularity Plus, Winona won’t. Fact is, even before she met her strange illegal destiny, she was considered semi-weird on the local level.

  For then, I mean. Of course, what passes for strange nowadays is twelve octaves more so. Example being: one of my favorite volunteer candy-stripers here at the Home. “My fave,” as she’d likely put it. Sweetest features you ever seen, but you know she went out and got herself a Mohawk hairdo? Fifteen years old. Then she just had to stick a pin clear through her right nostril, I’m not even talking about a brooch, child, I’m talking safety pin. And her daddy’s a doctor!

  The child still causes quite a stir when she sulks in here. Full of sighs and potential, this one. Jerome says she has a “advanced fashion sense.” If that means turning your ears and nose into a hardware store, I guess she does. She’s stayed right loyal to us, God love her. Me, I admire loyalty and remember it. I’m pleased the child wants to come in and help us—however she looks. Few along our hall still let her even read to them. I figure you can always close your eyes, during. Still, you know me, honey, I got to stare right at her. See, I’m trying and learn. I don’t plan to be like some of these fuddy-duds in here. Some whine they just don’t get the latest craze. Then they cross their arms, roll their eyes, and pray that death’ll take them beyond fads.

  She set here droning Dickens at me not two days back, hair up like a skunk taxidermied in butch wax. I said to her, “Zondro” (her real name is Sandra but she changed it just to have her way and feel in charge—something I understand). I go, “Zondro, is this new hairstyle a way of showing you feel … sad about the Indians?”

  That got a major sigh.

  “Why should I feel sad about some moldy old Indians? Hunh? Uh-oh, are you one? You could be. Indians have zillions of wrinkles too, maybe from living outdoors. But I don’t even know any Indians, do you, Luce?” (I let these young ones call me what they will. I’m glad they speak to me at all.)

  “None that’re full-blooded.” But I asked why that pelt set aslant young Zondro’s noggin? I told her I won’t judging, just keeping up. “Is your new ‘do’ maybe a sign of modern … sadness?”

  “Hey, does it all always have to mean stuff? People your age never catch on. You think all of it always adds up to something. Read Zondro’s lips. Start with zero, then go down from there. Everybody in here is old but you’ve really racked up the oldie-moldie points, hunh? You could’ve probably been next-door neighbors to the Flintstones.”

  “To the who?”

  “Fred and Wilma Flintstone.”

  “I knew a Fred and Wilma. Lived out by the ice plant?”

  “It’s more like a joke. Only not.” She
was back to the hair—these young ones’ll skip around on you. They get it from off the TV, channel hopping. “See, there’s a guy at school that’s completely drop-dead-looking, hunk city. So, see, he did it and then he caught so much flak, his four best friends got theirs shaved to keep him company and then—when I heard how people yelled things out of cars at them and threw beer bottles and stared and gave them such intensive heavy-duty static, well, one night I got super-bummed over it and I felt so, like, totally fritzed, I grabbed the pinking shears and then my mom’s Lady Norelco and, well, the rest is history. We hang out at the Mall. People are so rude. We’re just showing them that we’re, you know, resisting it all. They feel that, and boy they just hate you for it. My friend, Jason? he keeps his unbelievably neat, his stretches from here to here. My boyfriend’s is star-shaped.”

  “Your boyfriend’s what, sugar?”

  “His hair, dummy. Sorry. But you have a dirty mind. You do, Luce. Down and dirty. How can you be so old and still think about it just nonstop? I hope I don’t, not then. Some days I’m sick of it already. You’re always asking me this bizarre-o stuff. I’ve already told you way too much about him and me. Way way too. I don’t know. I guess I hope you won’t remember. Between visits. Others in here lose it week to week.

  “I mostly just tell you stuff because you’re here and can’t move and I need to … to tell. But you? you always remember. It’s not fair almost. I don’t think you’d use it against me, but who can anybody trust? Remember about in the car, at night, that time in the car with the three of them? I’m sorry, Luce, but you keep hoping for more pay dirt. You keep expecting I’ll be … personal. Jason wants to make his into a swastika but he’s redheaded and did you ever try and make your red hair be a swastika?”

  I admitted as how I hadn’t, yet.

  “Well, swastikas are super-hard to see unless you’re standing right over the person or if they lean way down to show you, and that’s not cool, especially not at the Mall. We’re just there, minding our own business and these, like, hicks—do the rest. They start stuff. Sorry about unloading on ‘hicks’ too. Look, maybe we better just get back into this oldtimey story junk you keep asking for.”

  “Fine, sugar, didn’t mean to pry none, just struggling to stay ‘up to the minute.’ It’s a job, ain’t it?”

  Dickens is about to have Bill Sikes throttle little Oliver to death and Zondro reads this like tonight’s TV listing, no, without that much juice. Her tone sounds a regular robot’s—but at least her hair plans to be a prank. I think she means it partway as a joke. See, I’m trying and catch on. Darling? you got to really work at that to stay alive, don’t you?

  But, yeah, getting back—for around here, in 18 and 60–65, never leaving your small house, intermarrying canaries among theirselves to be your only conversation partners, letting your yard go to weeds then woods, plus later living on the wrong side of the law … well, for then and there, it did seem pretty do-funny. Not, I admit, a safety pin through the nose—but every age has got its own pet form of weirdness, honey.

  There’s styles in madness too.

  2

  HOW DID locals know that Mrs. Smythe’s pretty son had been shot dead? They heard the lady’s sounds, they saw her rolling around in the front yard’s high weeds. The poor postman stood outside Winona’s garden gate. He was just watching. Since telegraph lines were down, it’d fallen to this fellow—delivering the city limits’ worst possible news. Such letters from General Headquarters/Richmond came in black-edged envelopes. You were at least spared the suspense of wondering what was in yours.

  First the postman rung a corroded bell on the widow’s rusted gate. Honeysuckle had already heaved her cast-iron fence ten inches off the ground. For the longest time, no answer—only canaries’ scared cheeping from the glassed porch. Finally she did stomp out, but like interrupted from doing something pretty doggone big-time. The postman was holding out a fat letter, afraid to step onto the wooded lot. “I am,” he said, “so sorry to be the one. It’s this. One of these.”

  Living isolated like she did, the widow wouldn’t of known what a black-rimmed envelope meant. Mrs. Smythe was a squat mug-shaped woman with a man’s face but a baby’s shoe size (4). She already wore black for the sake of a husband, dead these six years. She snatched the thing. Our mailman—armed with smelling salts and extra hankies—stayed to be of use. He watched the lady turn away from him and start reading. Even after a hiccup at seeing the first line, she kept on, bringing the pages closer and closer to her face till, by the end some minutes later, she fell directly off the brick path and—making such sounds—went climbing through her jungly yard. They say it was most terrible to see.

  She didn’t crawl toward her house but went lunging among underbrush, holding the letter stretched between either tiny hand, using elbows and knees to inchworm her weight along. Beloved birds indoors, hearing such cries, went nearbout crazy. Canaries had remained Winona’s best and only friends. Her body stayed low to the ground—like some soldier’s when air’s plaited through with lead.

  Neighbors heard, walked, come rushing. Among them my own mother—who was not that yet—a thin strict half-spoilt heiress whose mission in life was to later whip me into ladyship and grammar and who failed at both, poor thing. Folks found courage, finally pushed open a creaking gate, they lifted Mrs. Smythe from out the chest-high weeds of her un-lawn. They helped the lady up porch steps into her house. Nobody had ever been invited in. The grocery delivery boy claimed it was the worst-kept white household in town, no cleaning done, ever. Widow Smythe’s staples were mostly oatmeal and pralines, plus birdseed purchased by the tow sack.

  Entering, folks hushed from the shock (“Not our polite little Ned”). Folks silently remembered small neighborhood decencies of his. Bound for school, how clean Ned looked. True, he placed live pigeons in the schoolhouse desk drawer of “Witch” Beale. But when they flew at her, she laughed!

  Visitors soon grew quieter from the pure strangeness of being in here. Overdue library books were stacked in columns clear to the ceiling. You wandered across scattered birdseed husks, in some spots inches deep. “Like sand on the beach,” said Momma every time she retold this later, “thick as sand on the beach.” The front parlor was paved with old newspapers, spongy layers that your shoes sunk into. This whole home seemed the whispery bottom of a single birdcage.

  Some neighbor girls strolled right into Ned’s room. They’d always wanted to. Nobody thought of keeping them out. Girls knew just where he’d slept. Hadn’t they seen his lamp in here while he did homework for “Witch” Beale? Girls found the little cell real tidy, a few wooden toys, some pictures (a grizzly bear, a deer) cut from magazines and tacked up just so. One child touched the small oak bed’s white blanket, found a single golden hair, she held it to daylight. Other girls gathered to touch it. “That’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen,” one said, and, sniffling, girls retreated with their prize.

  Adults had propped up Mrs. Smythe—glassy-eyed—on a black horsehair chaise that proved she must let her thirty German-but-filthy birds fly free right often. Neighbors—waving the postman’s smelling salts under Winona’s big chin—were promising casseroles. During hurricanes and house fires, minutes after hatchet murders, the ladies of Falls had and have one ready answer for survivors: a nice hot casserole. It still works, darling, and I’m glad for it, having eaten many a one since I got too old for anybody’s letting me near a gas stove. (They tried calling me a public menace for cooking my own breakfast—alone at home, imagine!)

  Neighbors were already forming shifts to come check on Mrs. Smythe. Somebody noticed her breath steady a bit, her nostrils spread. She suddenly bellowed, “You made him leave. My one child. I should’ve kept him back. You know what he looked like? How he sounded? You led the brass band to my front gate. You’ll lose your war anyway. Watch. I just understood—I’ll never see him again, will I? Tell me otherwise. I’ll never get to wash his hair again.—Who asked you in here? Vultures, with their young.
You swoop in the one time I’m too pained to stop you. Buzzards! Leeches and their leech babies!”

  The group back-stepped quick over years of Falls Herald Travelers. Winona lurched, folks spilled down her brick steps. The committee of girls ran fast but guarded that one hair like it was some single lighted birthday candle. Everybody poured through the garden gate, feeling safer on the street. But Winona didn’t leave her home. You could see her in there releasing all birds from their cages. She slammed her front door. Through porch-glass panes, neighbors saw a black dress now flocked across with beating yellow wings—the fragilest cloak and helmet of real lives. “Make my skin crawl,” somebody said. Somebody else said, “She’d be a novel, but nobody’d believe it.”

  Won’t two full days after the widow drove sympathizers from her yard, she posted a sign announcing that her songbirds were now for sale. (She’d been broke but hadn’t admitted it till knowing her poor Ned was dead.) And it was that very evening, her watchful neighbors—ever vigilant for casserole reasons or new chapters in the not yet written Book of Here—noticed the addition.