Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

  Ned, who’d heard about this tree his whole life long, whose very name was stuffed so full of this sad spot, kept bouncing all over, just dying to climb up after. But I clutched him by the wrist, no way would I let him budge. Our group stood looking up at one knotty sycamore, hearing nothing. Even the baby in her hamper was awake, her Marsden gray eyes open, fixed straight up. For a while it seemed my husband would never come down again. From behind broad leaves, no sound. For miles around us here, such stillness.

  IT FELT like that wicked old war—after too long a wait—had got its way at last, had finally sucked him up. I stood here, every neck muscle tightening from gawking overhead too long. I wondered: Girl, what will you do if it has finally funneled him up into its very craw? “Live, I guess.”

  That was my best answer. And still is.

  Then we heard the slightest cry. I figured he’d come upon a skeleton, something dangling up there still. I’m sorry, I just didn’t want my children near this. Was I wrong? I wished that I could drive the motorcar. I’d leave, I would. Up high, he parted greenery. He was nearer the treetop than it seemed any fellow his size could find support. A full fifty-five to sixty feet in air over the lake and us. Green divided, he popped out before it, all in black. Cap said, “Look, love.” He meant me. He never called me that at home. I felt like he’d just spoke to somebody else.

  “Still here, it’s here.” His one arm crooked around a bough, his other held out what seemed part of a crisp old harness yet knotted there. Cap posed so high above the water. You knew that to just swing from such height into a lake so shallow would kill a diving boy for sure.

  By kicking two limbs aside with a free leg, then pinning branches back, Cap could show us: One branch had someway swollen. He had a hold of something. Wood looked puffed, like bordering some tourniquet, the leather maybe wedged inside its deep grooved dent of bark. “I was right,” his voice bounced out over the lake and back. “All of it’s true.” He sounded fearful he’d been making up each word for fifty years.

  Which bothered me. At my arm’s end, our child named Ned kept wriggling side to side, pleading to please go up, could he, could he please? (And I stood thinking just, Uh-oh. Was wondering, If Cap has talked about it so much when there was still some doubt, what now—which last few square inches of the man’s attention must I try and fit into next?)

  The man held out a leather cord. It was half white, looked salty with age. My husband stood far up as an angel in the lush folds of this tree. Our heads tipped back so as to see him. He leaned forward, moving to test the rein’s strength. Our babies edged nearer me. Many short spines pressed against my legs. “Don’t, Daddy,” Lou whispered straight up. We expected he would now fall: break his neck. Canted forward, he was sure trying. I saw he’d half planned this. Maybe to drop, maybe to bust his skull in the same shallows where his friend’d died. I didn’t understand. His logic was diseased but, for him, it was logic. And yet, the leather, it held—supported even a man grown to this serious size.

  After slumping forward, his watch a pendulum above us, after he’d heaved out like begging that line to snap, Captain tipped back to safety. Then, behind the crook of one arm, he covered his face, started making the shrill sounds of a boy upset. Crickets hushed a hundred percent now.

  Finally my husband called down to us and the lake, “What’d he do? What’d he do?”—Like we had killed that child.

  On ground, our children gave off unplanned little groans. Not understanding anything, feeling everything. I almost sobbed, for reasons of my own. Part rivalry. I knew that nothing I could ever do or say would compare with my real enemy—a boy-corpse since ’62. My crying jostled the hamper I still held. Our baby girl started, loud, too. It got almost funny, all of us crying out here in the middle of nowheres, the noise.

  Well, recovered some, Captain now wanted each of us—me and every last child—to come up in the high tree and be with him, to see the leather thong. Right now, he said, this instant. Fifty-five to sixty-five feet straight up. Well, honey, that’s where I drew the line. A mother she has to. Eight youngsters from age nine years to eighteen months. Half accidental, I let Ned’s hand aloose, he practically ran vertical, laughing as he commenced the scramble, hidden by full September leaves. He hadn’t yet connected death with the famous story of this place, was just glad to climb, a child. Even scared of Captain, I someway allowed our eldest, Louisa, to go struggling up too. Maybe to guard Ned? She went carrying her diary stuffed into the back of her skirt’s elastic. She’d said she was going to have a jump on her first school assignment, “What I did on my summer vacation.” (Big-boned, watchful, up she slid behind leaves, lost to me.) “Call them back,” I told myself. “No. They’re half his. Not half, but some. A portion his.”

  Our youngests, hopping every which way, begged to go. They couldn’t half walk yet, much less scurry ape-wise straight up into air. Baby, she sure whined. “No way,” said I. “Baby miss,” she yelled, meaning she always missed the good stuff, fun.

  Well the Captain glared down on me and gave what he now called a direct order. His face—seen from underneath—was a pink udder full of blood. He didn’t much like my staying on the ground, sparing my wee ones. Didn’t like that a bit. Wanted each infant to see one piece of cracked horse harness choking some treetop. I watched him frown and mutter down at me. Next his tone changed, he went, “But please, Lucy, I’ve come all this way.” And I felt for him then, I did. I knew that a softer decent-er woman would have passed her whole brood—whole life—into his hands. But, listen, staring up, I understood, I wasn’t so much scared he’d mistakenly drop one of my wee ones. Fact is, I felt spooked he’d throw one. Into the lake. On purpose.

  I could someway tell he wanted to. I heard my eldests move higher, nearing him. I saw branches quiver with their minor added weight, tree’s tip nodding with a man’s great size. That sycamore kept shivering. I knew the Captain had some strange plan. Maybe he wanted to chuck a live child into water for a offering, maybe he hoped the sacrifice would let his friend swim ashore, awake and new, speckled with greeny film.

  Captain waited for Ned and Lou to hand-climb within reach, he looked so odd up yonder. In black, one leg holding tree limbs aside, he was scoffing down like a naysaying Jeremiah, one minute nagging me up to him, next promising things like some sly salesman, saying Lucy this and Lucy that but looking grim and black there on high, looking like something hungry.

  Honey, I shook my head No so many time I nearbout lost balance, I almost fell back in the lake itself. “No way, mister. You cannot have these ones of mine!” I was quaking so bad I had to set the baby’s hamper down before I dropped it. I screamed, “Ned! Lou! You come down from there/this/second/and/no/questions/asked. It’s me or him, you hear? Get your bodies down here if you plan to stay living!”

  I heard them stop their long crawl up. Then, without one little gripe (God bless them), I felt both souls ease, branch by branch, back down to me, towards ground, and breathing a bit longer.

  To this day, I don’t know if he’d of hurt them. It was something I felt. And listen here, I knew him, didn’t I? I knew and know that man.

  When they dropped back into my sight, I expected they’d act peeved. They each bolted over and held on around my hips—like they’d been scared all during and were just waiting for some order stronger than the old man’s.

  Well, we all stood on firm ground, shaking as a group. Well, when he seen how they’d turned back, had tricked him and were safe on land with me, oh the things he said.

  Older children hid their eyes, like that’d help shield them from what he bellowed at us from on high. He was rocking side to side, the whole tree rustling, creaking, pitching with a man’s unnatural weight up top. He yelled I was a turncoat, a lady Yankee spy that’d helped them burn his family’s place, a camp follower, worse. Then he let limbs go. One hiss covered him. Bits of bark came sifting down on us. No telling how long we waited. It was so hot. The end of a long humid summer. We stood. We sat. I saw Ned no
tice a whitish rock he wanted to collect but felt too polite or fretful to go after. “Grab it,” I told him, and he smiled, dashing over.

  Finally we heard Captain start his own glum climb downwards. Whole flakes scuffed off the sycamore’s wallpapery trunk. Bark drifted down before our upturned faces like so many ashes or diplomas. Parchment all around us. First his black-buttoned shoes bobbled into view, then dark mud-crusted pant legs, striped jet-black silk socks, and then the rest of him. On the tree’s far side, away from us—he fell, landing square and heavy, one wet thud.

  When he rose up, the man looked over one shoulder, his back to all of us, him muttery, bent in. The face looked puffed, ruddy from being so angry, like some venom had worked loose in him. He hunched over something. He had cut a piece of the harness to carry home. Kept holding it close up to his chest and beard, like we planned to steal it. He moved twenty feet across a clearing, stood guarding the thing like a splinter from the Cross itself.

  I figured he needed time alone. I told him, We’ll be waiting in the Ford.

  “Don’t leave me,” he spun our way, voice pained, pure child now.

  “Won’t,” I promised—stepping nearer, playing totally unscared. “None of us can drive it, remember?”

  We’d waited an hour and a half (Ned had gathered half the white rocks of Virginia). Cap finally turned up—breathing like he’d swum that lake. He smelled of bottom mud, his face looked neutral. He held the harness mashed between two hands like some small life he’d trapped.

  4

  THE WHOLE trip home, Cap said nothing. Didn’t eat. The children tried to keep hushed but that lasted about ten miles and who can blame them? Usual noise gave me such comfort now. I listened to many wayward bits of their jabber. Baby was trying to make her baby talk understood. “Baby miss,” she repeated a good bit. Not easy to make out, yet forever poised, that one. The others teased her. She seemed pretty able to take it and I soon quit fighting for her. Cap stopped at diners now, not groceries. Didn’t seem to care about saving money anymore. Whilst we ate, staring (guilty) out the restaurant window, he’d stay right at the wheel, like being another part of the car. Underway, he went slower than before, a perfect driver, with that bit of leather clamped betwixt his wide red fist and the black steering wheel. After we’d finished our diner breakfast, Ned or Lou or me had to step before the Model T and crank the motor, get her going. Cap would not climb out. Them whole two days bound home, I never once saw him go to the bathroom.

  We started seeing landmarks we knew. I hoped he’d turn, by degree, more into hisself again. The children commenced pointing at things. “I knew that was over there,” Ned boasted as we rounded a curve. A fancy lattice gazebo on a farm lawn—six funny whirligigs spinning at its six corners, one little jigsawed farmer chopping wood, another cow-milking—all inspired by wind into a joy of blurred enameled moving parts. Then, one half-burned barn. A low creek without no name. These all felt famous. To me and us they did. I loved hearing the kids predict sights I thought that only I had noticed. I recalled my honeymoon return. I remembered my own husband’s long walk from Virginia wearing hand-rolled tow-sacking shoes, fifteen, every step a decision. We passed four charred chimneys of the Marsdens’ spoilt plantation home. Captain, our Captain—speeding us back into civilian life—man never even glanced The Lilacs’ way.

  Finally just outside Falls’ Baby Africa, Castalia’s place. Unmatched non-painted shanties seemed to have grown in a circle the way mushrooms’ll spring up after May rain. Her house’s wood had silvered to the color of a nickel. She’d made her outhouse from a Bull Durham backstop thrown out of the ballpark. Its sides showed a salad of red paint and chopped lettering. Gave you something to read whilst sitting in there.

  Cassie had kept expanding the stilted mink cage herself. It grew by seasons like big wasp nests do. Thing now wrapped around her shanty—so she could hear whenever dogs stopped in to run the minks, make them lose weight and dull her future coat. Its single tube of screening looped round her lot like a long tossed fur stole, a boa maybe. Her four youngests were playing outdoors—towels tied around their necks as capes. Her baby—hearing our Ford come chugging—bolted from the outhouse trailing a towel cape, pulling up knickers with one hand, waving the other. “Look,” Lou called. “It’s Leander, Reba, Aubergine, and Antwan. Stop, Poppa. Look, they really want us to.”

  “Do. For the children.” I reached out and touched Cap’s arm—he flinched like my fingers were live coals. Ford coughed on, past running kids. I turned, glad at least Castalia hadn’t seen.

  As we pulled down Summit Avenue toward our place, children stayed quiet in back, we passed our town librarian supervising six high school kids. Their arms were stacked with towers of books. The librarian nodded Yes, grinning. Then we approached Winona Smythe’s home. The house itself was present but her yard was now just flat lawn. A crew of neighbors worked with saws and they too smiled on seeing us. Without Winona’s jungle, the whole street looked bald. “Gone!” they called when Cap slammed on brakes, jumped out.

  “Where to?” I hollered.

  “Thin air!”

  We all patrolled a home now totally purged of its Winona-ness. Weird for 1910, its lack of weirdness. Ladies who’d said for years—“Ooh but I’d love to spend one day inside that health hazard,” they sure had. The house reeked of ammonia, of everything but the ticklish history of dynasties of yellow birds.

  Captain stood in the small second bedroom. He was leaning in its doorway.

  “Near as we can tell,” the Mayor’s sister’s husband explained to Marsden’s back, “she just took clothes, her birdcages, and the bed out of here, her late son’s, near as we can tell. All the doors were open. That got my wife’s attention. No note, no nothing. We’re not even sure who owns the place.”

  “I … do,” said the Captain. Then I saw it come to him—there might be a note for him, one Winona’d mailed to our home. He got us home right quick. I said nothing. I knew not to. After his recently trying and lure my babies up the tree, after finding that his Thursday pal since ’65 was fled—I kept real real still, child.

  I worried how all this would change him. I recalled his saying the one word, “betrayed.”

  Soon as we pulled up before our own house, Cap stomped indoors. Cassie had seen that mail got stacked on the hall table. By the time I’d supervised our rumble seat’s unpacking, and started making the first few forays indoors lugging stuff—I found envelopes thrown everyplace, him seeking the Widow Smythe’s reasoning. I was unloading the boot of our Ford when my husband strides out right past me. “Nothing” is the only word he says. Headed downtown, the man was already wearing his full-dress uniform, feathered hat and all. He wore that getup for a week, ten days. Put it on for General Forrest’s birthday, July the thirteenth. Come winter—when he got it out for Lincoln’s (and not the day Abe got shot, but his horning date)—well, then I knew the Captain wanted to live in the thing. He pretty much did.

  Mrs. Peahen quaked to think what plumage-saber rattling lay ahead.

  Home again, our car covered with great sprays of red Virginia mud, I myself set to cleaning with a unhealthy vengeance. Ned’s latest mineral trove stayed underfoot all up and down the back-porch steps. (I would not let him tuck rocks under his bed—the place where his poppa stowed guns.) Ned says, “But they’ll get rained on.” “Honey, where you think they been since God wore knee pants? They love rain. That’s what chipped them off of mountains and made independent rocks of them. They lap rain up. Rain’s their … travel agent.”

  “That true?” He squinted, moist gray eyes fixed on me. I touched his humidor curls. “Go think about it,” I told him. “And if Momma’s wrong, come tell her something truer.” You got to keep them busy, honey. Was one thing I was good at.

  ALMOST immediately on getting back, our Baby started talking plainer. She’d been goo-gooing whole sentences for weeks but now we sort of understood them. She made sense earlier than any child I’ve heard of. This, for her momma, prov
ed both a novelty and a pain. Her starting words were: “Bay might miss.” Meaning: Baby might miss something. You couldn’t leave that one anyplace by herself. Try and you’d hear a tiny bubble voice say, “Bay does miss.” I felt for her, I knew the feeling. Mostly we just left her cradle parked smack in the middle of our living room. Not nine months old, but you couldn’t put a thing over on that one. Had to be the center of everything from Word One, honey. Pretty as the cover of a candy box. Everybody said so.

  Returned, I got busier than need be. I do that. He stayed away more. I rarely knew if I’d see him at dinner or no. By day, you never witnessed such housecleaning as mine on returning. Now I understand that it was superstition. His voodoo meant driving north, cutting magic charms down from trees. Mine seemed to involve purging dust kittens from our upstairs halls. Maybe I’d been inspired by seeing Winona’s yard timbered and purged of muskrat nests. Got so evening itself looked like a form of dinge trying and settle on all my just-cleaned home surfaces. “Oh no you don’t, darkness!” I bleached the linens till some got tiny holes at their edges, shaming me. I believe I thought—don’t laugh—that I could someway clean his sadness from his life and mine. I’d get our one white house just perfect.

  Someway, everything felt changed.

  Since the tree, our kids acted half afraid of him. I saw him notice. I regretted how that kept him from the house still more. He went to poker games and steeplechases. On the Outer Banks, in our lieutenant governor’s company, he shot many a innocent duck.

  Nights he did eat at home, our table talk grew sparser, his and mine. The children gabbled on—like trying and take up the slack. They stared at him a bit too much. Cap left off telling me his stockyard news. I risked making a joke about the sheep counter that divided by four. On the foot-treadle Singer, I made myself a new dress—a nice flashy gray worsted. I feebly hoped to get his attention. Not that I wanted it, but more to cure him. What am I saying, darling? Of course, I wanted it. I asked Cassie’s advice. She said he was remourning his young Ned, and then to come home and find Ned’s momma needed mourning too. Rough on anybody. I saw that. Still.… Our kids’d bravely ask him to pick them up and twirl them in his arms like usual. He looked down at them like they were Martians talking French. The man’s moods turned more dark, they really lasted now. Earlier, his tempers were what you might could call Washable Blue—now they ran towards Permanent Royal Black. Too dark to ever wash out, too dark to look through, into or past.