Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

  After Cap dragged us to war again, with me laid up and ripening towards Cassie’s handy help, I started fading in a final way. Was feeling, child, like everybody’s inconvenience and eyesore. I was the one stain rusting something otherwise white and good. I was extra. By degree, I’d sunk, I had become the fuzz under furniture, I was the brown that made new wallpaper go stale and used-looking. In such a state, sleep avoids you like the plague. Just to lift your arm, just to manage dozing off for twenty minutes, you deserve the Noble Prize. You’d risk anything to try and shake this deep of a exhaustion. Louisa herself had started packing her brothers’ and sisters’ school lunches while I supervised from a yard chaise lugged into one corner of the kitchen. I felt sorry for my daughter, up at six-thirty. I made her keep the water boiling on the stove. I wanted to explain how water helped me to stay interested. The explanation seemed it’d require a full day’s energy. “Just do it,” I said. Sounded like her poppa, whose main reason to child-questions stayed: “Because I said so. Because you’re eating my food is why.”

  I hated who this tiredness and further pregnancy was turning Lucy into. That changed nothing, honey, nothing.

  The kids were at school, Baby was bored and actively saying so in the other room, and I soon got feeling like I knew what-all I needed. I grew crazy hungry for some one thing. You’re sad for it, like everything you lack is waiting in one food group. I asked Louisa to bring me a Monkey Ward catalogue, please. She did. Lou always did, poor thing. I flipped through it like through some menu of what-all I’d missed. “Let’s try something new” my husband had sometimes said in bed. I spoke that to the pages now. I needed, what? A snack of window caulking? no. A saucerful of face powder? no. Or did I need, like Wise Winona, to run off, to disappear no place?

  I’d never before got that famous dill-pickle-at-4 a.m. yen you hear of pregnant women having. But now, waiting on number nine, there seemed some one dish that might make everything up to me. Captain had once told us: Sows eat their young owing to a lack of niacin. Ain’t nothing personal. Starving for some one thing, I understood my sister sows better.

  I sampled flour from the sack. No, it won’t that I craved. I chewed a quarter pound of cloves (which is a lot of cloves, honey). I moved on to baking soda. Not quite. I hollered would Lou please bring some Niagara starch to my bed. Starch was sold in blocks then. I hacked off a good-sized piece and settled into eyes-shut chewing. I did the cud till my whole mouth felt soapy in a blank and sudsy way. Close. I swallowed half the bar that afternoon. I’d heard how black women downhill ate this stuff like candy. I recalled Winona’s bartered hardtack. I moved on to trying soil out of a flowerpot. To make it go down easier I used a tiny silver teaspoon as my genteel shovel. Felt I was on the brink of everything I needed. Soon the subtraction would reverse, I’d once more begin to get added on to. I needed … supplements, something. There won’t enough of me to fill the space requiring my being on guard these twenty-four full hours a day. Just thinking “twenty-four hours a day” made me get real tired, honey.—You still awake? You know the feeling?

  My children, out in the yard, had just been playing round my bed. I saw they’d left their crayons in a old fruitcake tin. I bent and scooped that up. Guilty, I commenced to nibbling crayons like bonbons, peeling off the wrappers first. Honey, I did have some pride left.

  Dainty, my eyes closed, I sat sampling crayons. Sky Blue tasted chemical but vague, Sea Green had a tang in it, but the sweetest two were Berry Red and my all-time favorite, Flesh. I stuffed myself, poking through these waxy sticks to find one little extra nub of Flesh, then gobbling it. Four kids filed in to ask me something. I tried hiding crayon peelings littering my counterpane and sheets. Seemed I had been snacking at my little ones’ expense, nibbling fingers, someway gnawing them. Flesh of my flesh. Well, being mine, they noticed. They backed some steps away from me. I longed to call, “Please understand. With crayons, it’s my first time—honest.”

  “She ate,” Baby, merciless from birth, pointed at me. Ned told younger ones, “Uh-oh, Momma’s turned wax eater on us. And I think she swallows.”

  I fought to explain but felt my molars cushioned in a film of smoothness. Kids looked back at me, sniffling—now right horrified, small hands on their small faces. Then I stared ahead. In the oval mirror opposite the bed, I saw myself—a gray person. I made a face, smiling, drawing back my upper lip. The teeth were rotten with all tints. I cried out. I tossed the fruitcake tin onto the floor. Crayons fired to far corners of the room, chattered out into the hall. I rolled over. I was shaking, I was facing the wall and I was shaking so.

  I heard my children crying in the yard.

  I onct had a husband. What do men do all day? Where was my husband?

  EVERY TIME Mother came calling, I perked up, played like all was well. Why couldn’t I tell anybody what was wrong? Why didn’t I know? There she stood in her tailored suit, white gloves, hat on, bringing me three more Lady’s Lending Library books, always three, always with titles like Her First Mistake and The Heart Is a Funny Thing, and Frail, plus Blood on the Delta. Just what I needed. Literature’s got to be a ticket into your own life, not out of it. For my momma, escape stayed the single luxury. I begun to imagine making Getaways literal … if I ever come back to being the full-moon phase, I’d let Lucy run away from home. Out of here, Eclipse.

  Momma had purchased a gaudy perfect bunch of zinnias from the colored ladies that peddled such things near the post office. Some days Momma told me she had grown these herself, specially for me. Now why did she lie? She’d always feared bugs (after a near-fatal childhood mishap with those). The lady hated yardwork. Still, I appreciated the thought. But, as I jammed zinnias into a bedside jar, they looked to me just like crayons come alive on stems. I knew that after Momma left—I giggled once, which spooked her some—I was going to have to sample one teentsy zinnia—nibble, nibble, little mouse.

  My mother’s the most fearful person I think I’ve ever known.

  Momma now offered news of far worse male and female troubles than my own. “You remember that cute Winnie Murchison, the one from the expensive scarf-dancing class I tried to interest you in but couldn’t? She was, what? two grades under you at Lower Normal? Remember how she always looked up to you so? You know the little Murchison I mean? Well, at least nod, Lucille. Seems the maid came to work, saw little Winnie’s shoes sticking out the pantry door. Well, Winnie was in them. Stroke. Never knew what hit her, doctor claims. One minute here … next minute? Dead at twenty-four. What can you say? That Winnie Murchison. And you recollect the oldest Thorp boy, the only really handsome one? Well, and remember the dangerous quarry swimming hole? Well, not a week ago, that warm Monday? …”

  She did half cheer me, but (as usual with mothers) for all the wrong reasons. While the strict lady jabbered sloppy tragedies with great good cheer, I sat up straight in bed, pretending I deserved to be talked at and was as basically alive as your next adult. It was easy to feel more alive than the weekly obit list she offered. With her here, my children gathered in my room. I felt ashamed—seemed that only when company arrived did they feel sure I’d behave regular. Outsiders were chaperones against my acting weird for 1911.

  Lou got my hairbrush from off the dresser and, listening to her grandma, my daughter groomed me. Then we traded off, me working on my eldest’s thin hair. Louisa pretended like we did this all the time—not just once a week when my momma visited. Mother watched, she set over there with her posies and news of maimings, her books about good women cornered on stormy nights by bad if handsome men.

  My children piled right into the bed with me. Grateful, I didn’t bother them about taking their dirty shoes off. I saw my mother wondering at this but saying nothing. As my life pretended to be hale and regular, my mother’s lipless doubting mouth grew tinier and tinier. Here she was: Mrs. Bianca McCloud Honicutt. How had rude me ever slicked out of a body that dry, that cripplingly polite? I pulled covers up over kids’ legs and gathered them against me, lumped under my
either arm. It was all a show for her—the clatch of us backed up by many pillows. My children liked it, so did I. It was all faked but—during—sure felt nice.

  The minute Momma said, “Well … this has been … Lucille, you certainly seem … don’t budge … no, no, I’ll show myself out” (as if I could, budge), soon as Momma closed the front door, children dragged down from my bed, my grasp. They didn’t blame me, see. Kids didn’t even seem too sad but acted like this had just been part of their duty, pretending I was basically okay. They seemed to hope that if they played-like once a week—they might help stave off further crayon gorging—might keep me with them and not off the edge where I usually wavered. “Don’t go away mad,” I called at them.

  “‘Just go away’?” Ned added, turning back, and shrugged. They didn’t hold it against me, darling. That was what worried me the most.

  HONEY, once my stiff well-meaning mother had cleared out, when the children had moped off to the side lot, I would lean back. I’d be remembering my own big bedroom upstairs in the homeplace. Frilled sunny room, it was. I’d once had no worries but homework, playing with my pal, Shirley, fretting over what to make Momma, Poppa, and the maiden aunts for Christmas.

  Come morning, I told myself that being so romantical about the past won’t good or healthy. I was the mother of eight, soon nine. I told myself: Lucy, try, girl. I would get the covers thrown back. Then I rested. I felt the ceiling was looking down with pity on the swollen legs I’d kept well hid from Momma. Ceiling looked down on my lower body pumped up like a balloon tire about to rupture with a cannon-firing sound. Then I pulled quilts back, decently covering myself again. No. Couldn’t. Compared to moving out of bed, a hemorrhage seemed a holiday. Two days after crayon snacking, I cleaned my teeth on the sheets. Every color in the world rubbed off. I wasn’t only ready for the worst, it seemed I was the worst, the trench that others’ runoff ran in. (I’m enjoying telling this!)

  A sparrow chirping in the hedge outside my bedroom window, got so I would weep over it. That little dun-colored bird sounded so feisty, a factory’s worth of willpower. I admired every creature more than myself. The baby turning in me, getting ready for the world by practicing to flex and strain, it seemed the President of the U.S. and me the cut-rate hotel room he’d been forced to stay in overnight thanks to a unexpected storm. I was a service, a waiting room designed for others’ comfort. I felt sorrier for the crayons I’d gobbled than I did for my own self.

  And where was the man I married? Off making more money, I guess. Off winning bets, off doing what he said he had to.

  HOW can you keep going? I’d be in the brass bred—bugle-colored—one Captain later made famous by lying in it till somebody thought up television and finally sent a camera to film him propped up there. My face was turned to the wallpaper. The upright bars at the bed’s far end looked like St. Peter’s gate and like a jail cell I’d hand-polished. Cassie was in the next room making a fuss over my latest (I’ve skipped that part, it wears on me to speak of it). Cassie was yelling orders through the window at my eldests in the swing out back. Castalia kept croaking snatches of a hymn, “Sweet Jesus, Don’t Nobody Work Like Him.” Captain was off God knows where making deals and mischief on some county farm. I was twenty-six. I was near a child’s weight myself. Here I rested, nine deliverings into my own life, nine passengers frailer.

  And was then, just past my bedroom window, outside on the vacant lot, I heard my third from oldest boy fall off the rope swing. (Hadn’t I told them: No more than three on the swing at onct? Hadn’t I told them?) From indoors, I knew the breath’d been knocked clean out of him—that terrible pause that can wake a mother from the dead.

  When he cried finally, when I heard he could gasp—that helped. Another boy kept whining from crabby hunger, from being overlooked too long. Baby was crying, “Baby miss,” scared the world was a party being held elsewhere. You know how your kids get frayed and wild and varmint-cranky without regular attention? The steadying word or touch to smooth them down some?

  Two crying and a third now tuning up. I could always tell the Why of each one’s sobs. For every child in turn, a whole new independent language. Maybe I only do speak English but I sure felt fluent—a college of college material—in my every baby’s fresh tongue.

  Lunch was late. Baby had sprained her wrist and was crazy to have its dingy bandage changed, hated dirt. Report cards wanted signing. All those lacks waited heaped out there: tree climbing, falling down weepy.

  Honey, was my own children made me turn my head back into the room. First they got me to sigh, a beginning. Then they got me propped up onto my elbows. Which let Lucy finally fling covers back, swing one bare foot at a time onto cold floorboards and a few stray guilty crayon rinds (my eyes opened from the chill—which helped). The room a wreck, dust everywhere like lintish buzzards gathered in far corners to watch me lose it all. Before I knew why (much less how), by using the bedstead as a early form of walker, practicing at the Vertical, I’d waddled off to make my peace with ragged smaller lives outside. Here comes Lady Crayola, Mrs. Spit-Polish and Heal.

  My arms sprung out, automatic balancing, I tried for my sea legs again, hoping to get back on gravity’s good side. I made it to the hall (so far, so good), I depended on furniture and the wall to help me find the staircase and then get down it, inching, but proud of progress, fighting faintness like it was some bad smell you can just decide decide decide not to notice.

  My loved ones pulled me back toward the fray. For a while more, I would be their chef and referee, their witness. Then I hoped to leave. I saw that now. Elsewhere looked real good.

  Four to the swing, they spied a shape leaning in their kitchen’s back screen door. Ned cried, “Momma’s up!” And they hurled into air and tumbled this way, running at me, colliding till they all but knocked me over. Then half on purpose, I did fall. But they were back of me to break it. I was going down onto a waiting curl and surf of bodies I had someway borne. They were all around me on the floor. They knew not to settle on my lower body, tender, sore. Castalia laughed from off the edge of what I saw. Her laugh swerved dark and rich and striped as her mink coat lowering into her idea of elegance at last.

  A convention—kids’ faces gathered round this fast-aging body, their first home. They thought I’d come downstairs to encourage them. But—hands all over my face and shoulders, ears: they didn’t none of them know that—for a while there, they were really all that kept me in the world, honey.

  Every single time, my loved ones teased me back to standing. (A trick!) Castalia come up then, holding our latest. She stood over me, here on the lino with my eight now playing with my hair—me powerless as Gulliver, pinned. Cassie looked me over with a touch of admiration, a great remembering tiredness of her own. “Again,” she smiled. “Here we goes again?”

  “Something like that,” said I, straight up. She stooped closer. Her strong hands put Archie, my weak newborn, on my breast and—Cas indulged herself—she leaned down, let her own big head rest for one second on my shoulder. “You,” I said so glad. And tears slid back to fill my ears.

  Here we go again. Before the kids run off—forgetting to remember me for another six weeks—we were for those few seconds a unit, like one centipede with many different shoe sizes on all sides, the tired willing legs of one long long long life.

  LOVE endures all, like they tell you. All. You can’t keep somebody truly stubborn down too long. But everything sure does try, right, child? And things most certainly do seem to get bunches better at it year by year. But look, I’m still sitting up here, right? Lucy ain’t all the way down even yet. Love suffereth all and is kind—though it really should eventually know better.

  Stubborn, love.

  Maybe even stupid. But who cares?

  AND WAS two days later, into the kitchen pushes my old man, home from nowhere after being there too long—he’s wearing the full-dress uniform—he bears a cordwood stack of guns and rifles. I’d been setting with Cassie over coffee here at
the kitchen table. She’d tucked a quilt around my slowly unswelling legs. Cap, he steps right by us, not one word, and him gone these four days without my knowing where.

  “So where you aiming, Fort Alamo?” Castalia most hollered. He paused, right-faced, and then, with great care, set weapons between Castalia and me on my red-and-white-checked-oilclothed table.

  “I didn’t hear the motorcar,” I said. He frowned to prove I had but little right to ask. Then Captain reached down, stroked stocks of guns between Cas and me. Such fondness in his touch. You could see they were old ones, you could see how some of their handles were hickory, others pinky-gold fruitwood. Brass hinges had greened a bit. Two musket butts looked notched, somebody’s scorekeeping. Ducks? Colored boys? I didn’t want to know.

  “This,” he touched one, “is the Revolution. And that exceptional specimen there saw duty in 18 and 12. Here’s a fine weapon that thundered on our side during the Mexican Expeditionary. And this,” he lifted what looked to be a squirrel gun, no better or worse, “belonged to the great Forrest himself.”

  “Let me axt you something, mister. You just give away your Ford car for these, right?” I felt glad that Cassie’d spared me saying it.

  “I have a museum here. They make more autocars. As for masterpieces such as these, this are all she wrote.” Then he started piling them again into his arm—weapons stacked clear to his beard.

  I stared at him. “And where you plan to keep them things, sir? Oh, by the way, nice of you to ask, it was a boy.”

  “That a fact? Well, how about that. Cause for celebration. I’m putting them under the bed, where a person’s guns belong. In handy reach. Too many children in this house for me to feel easy hanging firearms over the mantel.”