Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

  A first business partner had told Angus he was a fine judge of others’ characters—that he noticed everything but luck. Part of McCloud’s own luck meant: barely admitting to luck’s wild-child wild-card effect upon hisself, his fortunes.—That really is luck. Or is it?

  But the well-made fellow straightened now, no percentages in sulking, why dwell long on sadness? Just vanity, this hating to be wrong about your staff. Your sadness only burdened those around you. So Angus slid one arm along the pew back, guarding the three homely gifted girls here on his right. Maybe they’d been unduly upset by the excess emotion pounding hereabouts: Girls were crying as they’d never done (disappointing Angus) when their own little sister got so maimed.

  Hedged by weeping and the handclaps here, McCloud determined to feel cheered. Yes, you made your own luck. He imagined that first hive on open deck, bound for the new land. Bugs had been silent during the six-week crossing. Fed sugar water from a pan, they seemed groggy from the rocking and the salt air. But before even the keenest land-loving sailor sensed a continent waiting forty miles ahead in fog, bees knew. They smelled its fullness, the perfume. Nervous sailors gathered—smiling—around a hive suddenly humming, unsticking, groaning with a churning life—wholly charming, totally menacing. Kidnapped bugs sniffed it first: green profit dead ahead.

  Angus could so easily picture his Bianca alone at home now. She’d be straight-backed before her new white Steinway. He had never offered her anything but the earth’s fullest and finest, its choicest help.

  And—for all the sadness of this Maimie business—my granddad supposed that here, too, if half on the slant, he had somehow managed. Again he’d come out in the black. Maimie’d at least given Angus what he claimed to want. Even from Beech, he’d got the verrra best of help.

  So, sure: His youngest could be trusted alone at home for the hour and a half one funeral’d take.

  She was, after all, such a good little girl.

  Why I Say Ain’t

  God setteth the solitary in families …

  —PSALM 68:6

  SO ONCE, YEAH, happiness. Once fourteen prisms hang in another little girl’s room, these prove that even whitest daylight lives packed with secretive wild colors. God assigned me to the household of a grown lady once also a wild child but stung so strict! Let’s skip it, child. Let’s commence with happiness, my own, and work our way down, okay?

  I picture my gold-haired best friend, Shirley Williams. Nine birthdays into things, Shirl ofttimes slept over at our house. It had three stories, one corner of each: stained glass. Shirl was born poor. When stepping into our place, she forever whispered.

  I’ll start at Happiness. Okay—once—that.

  Just tuck Shirl and me into separate high-backed rosewood beds carved with garlands. My room’s bay window had prisms playing starring parts. Prisms decked my quilts and wallpaper with blobs of color like the very rainbow’s droppings. One white enameled drawer-pull beat with changing tints, kind of gulped with light—like the gill on something living. Across Shirl’s slip (strung neat as her across a chair back) six raw colors held a powwow. Down the street, from Winona Smythe’s open porch, canaries sang, announcing daylight like they’d got the patent on it. Then I would start jumping up and down in bed, I chucked two pillows towards Shirley, I commenced hollering our favorite Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson poem, loud:

  A robin with a yellow bill

  opped upon the windowsill,

  Cocked his shiny eye and said,

  “Ain’t you ‘shamed, you sleepyhead?”

  Though Shirl was dozing in the bed opposite, her yellow curls looked right awake. She always groomed herself alive. Now she slumped forward, fingers plumping each ringlet, laughing, puffy, “You old so-and-so. It’s day again! What’ll we do first?” She grinned, she stretched, maybe she looked too excellent to stay mine long.

  We bounced on beds, chanting, “Ain’t you ’shamed, oh ain’t you ’shamed?” Lilacs sent excess stink to our second floor. You heard bacon frying downstairs. Momma—still fearful of hiring black help—argued aloud with bacon over how its ends kept curling up, not behaving like choice cuts she’d paid for. Honey—I didn’t know that this was happiness, not then. Looking back, over a pile of guns alive as brown-and-silver snakes under your bed, you understand.

  The one complicated sight that morning—blood on our sheets. See, the day before, my friend and me had cut our wrists. There’s a story here. That much I know.

  So, yeah, sacks of seasons before hitting my nineties’ city-limits sign, back when men were men and women weren’t so sure they liked it, in advance of being queen bee to my own busy hive, why, prior to even getting engaged, I was the mischief of a child I’ve skipped over total. Back, back, back, a bucket down a well. Let hemlines fall where they may.

  My momma looked dignified as a dictionary (everything in it). Was straight-backed as our front hall’s Shaker chair (where no soul ever sat—only company’s hats). Her words seemed counted in advance, party favors, one per guest. She kept hands clasped before her. She kept her hair all baled behind her in one breast-shaped bun. Momma’s long dresses glided like on wheels. By now, folks feared her. Folks were right to. A cultivated person in a hick town, Momma ofttimes praised Mr. Bizet’s Carmen, claiming it’d done for the Latin temperament what Mr. Wagner’d failed to manage with the German one. Only her sisters knew what she meant by this but they disagreed. Besides, she hadn’t spoke to them for years.—Some folks’ tragedy, child, is not caring what anybody thinks of them. Others, like Momma, are forced to care too much. My own early roughness didn’t just irk Momma—it scared her so.

  And him? Red-haired and rawboned even in how he sounded. Poppa spun a chatter full of homemades: spur-of-the moment words like “scuzz-budgets” and “hoity-toilets.” Momma traced my own foul grammar right back to him. I admit he wouldn’t win no diction certificates. Poppa’s agreement between his subjects and verbs was broke about as often as Indian treaties. But in the contest betwixt what’s proper and what’s fun—he come out as Champion every time.

  The man would shuffle downtown (in no hurry, auburn everywheres, shirt misbuttoned—face as bristled, useful, centered as a Welcome mat). He’d soon tote home the bread she’d sent him for. But in the nine minutes he’d been gone, Poppa’s broken English had stored Magellan’s own amount of info—man had hints, gossips, lapses, he’d seen whose Episcopalian lapdog was in heat and which twelve pagan yellow yard dogs knew it.

  Momma punished me for any echo of the man. She said that Ain’t was such a no-count mongrel, it had never even got into the social register of English. And, looking back, I see she had her reasons. It’s too late to improve or reconsider now. At the time I figured she was just being extra snobby. Now I understand—Ain’t changed my life. Ain’t forced me to marry at fifteen. Ain’t was the crowbar that shoehorned me into bed beneath a certain wide tough gentleman. Old Ain’t. And Momma warned me.

  ME AT NINE? That’s easy. Hell on shoe leather. A porridge of freckles, two stiff auburn braids spouting off one stubborn streak. Like now, my front teeth were missing, but then I had a chance of new ones growing in. Through the gap, I’d spit and whistle. I stayed busy masterminding ropes and pulleys, tugging planks and found furniture to a tree house sixty feet up. Across my knees and elbows, I had so many knots and scabs and bug bites, these could’ve spelled a book of verse in Braille.

  We were rich enough. We were rich. We lived along Falls’ only crest. Hill towns are too easy to read. Rich folks stay up top where breezes make life possible. The single view for miles is like a club you join by paying dues.

  Our Summit Avenue was a regular museum of gingerbread porches, competition yardwork. By the curb, horse’s-head metal hitching posts were painted the rich mahogany of black people’s skin. Some hitching posts were metal colored boys enameled into clothes the tints of carousel hobbyhorses. Our street said: A place for everybody, everybody in his place. Us especially. Others? Eat your heart out.

 
County hay wains and buckboards would tool in of a Sunday to check us out. Summit Avenue got paved before any road in eastern North Carolina. Farmers drove back and forth—mouths open, choosing which house, if one was offered free of charge, they’d pick. To my knowledge, no house ever was.—From our porch swing, I wanted to bellow, Go on home, you-all have whole fields, so what’s a measly yard to you?

  While they oohed at our front walk’s cheese-even boxwoods, where was I? Off downhill visiting my favorite poor girl, Shirl. Or maybe indoors getting knuckles slapped for saying Ain’t again. For this, I ofttimes got hurt, always by Momma. She believed in discipline, wanted me to act rich, hoped I’d protect myself. From what? I wondered. “From them,” she answered, whispering in our servantless house.

  Thanks to her money, we lived on this street I never felt entitled to. Poor kids stole home from school along Summit, big-eyed—even brothers and sisters tended to hold hands. They pretended to have dibs on some fine mansion. And Miss Entitled? I went slipping along side streets, I followed ditches clear downhill via Baby Africa. Except on wettest days, this stayed Lucy’s long route home. I dodged in through our back door, the former servants’ entrance. I appeared scuffed and ruddy as a farm child. Like Poppa, I was raw, carroty-colored. Momma, a true white woman, stayed more like cauliflower baked to that sad innocence past texture.

  Girl snobs and mother snobs had already commenced to snubbing your little Lucy. Was thanks to my copycat Ain’t, a tendency to pick my general nose area, a trend towards pushing small dull facts into taller more worthier tales, a knack for imitating others, a fondness for the noisy. The stable-keeper’s daughter was fast becoming my one friend. Momma took me aside, let me know: Noblesse oblige had its limits. “Sally who?” I said. She explained: I could do better socially than this Shirley person. Momma warned: No self-respecting family would keep asking me into finer homes if my company and English didn’t straighten up and fly right, “You hear me, Miss Poverty Lips?”

  2

  POOR as Shirley was, she spoke proper as a teacher. After she slept over, I’d find traces of her tucked back of couch cushions—homemade vocabulary flash cards: “Incorrigible.” “Obsequious.” Which broke my heart. When did daily talk ever ask “obsequious” of any living soul? Shirl seemed to think that onct she’d trained me right, the two of us might go—almost a couple—into the high-ceilinged parlors of Falls’ tip-top society. Seated high in our secret tree house, Shirley asked with pity if I even knew what gerunds were. I scratched my head, copying a ropy Poppa, “Gerunds, gerunds.—Sounds like … sprouted wheat?” She didn’t laugh. I never stopped trying to make Shirl laugh. I wondered if her lack of money subtracted that much humor from the world.

  Other Summit Avenue girls had already titled me Miss Lucy Trench-mouth. It hurt to hear and, even now, it smarts a little to admit the grief I got—even from their mothers. Especially from them. “Lucille, Emily must go in and practice her En-glish lessons. I believe I hear your parents calling you.”

  “From six blocks off? You don’t no such of a thing, lady. I can take me a hint. Bye, Em. Boy, that ain’t too nice. And you all call me rude!”

  At the time, I tried and play like I was half proud of being sniffed at on by my street. I hid in our cozy tree house. With Shirley as my choicest friend, I felt stronger than them Episcopalian fussbudgets. Like me, Shirl was totally Baptist. Full of dread, we had been dunked the same day. Shirl’s mother stuffed her child’s golden curls into a kind of rubber bathing cap. I went bareheaded. Sun had cooked my hempy braids bone-dry by 2 p.m.

  We sat together in every service, as far from our stern parents as possible, we constantly passed notes. Our great trick was pretending we’d dozed off during the Reverend’s dull whinings. Other preachers raged and hellfired. Ours just scolded. Many adults slept, too. Snoozing, snorting, Mr. Pember drooled onto his tie. We saw, it like to made us die giggling. Every time we looked, the stain got worse and wider. Some total stranger seated behind me, now bent forward, thumped me on the skull. Shirl straightened at onct. Then, improved, safe herself, using a little gold mechanical pencil she carried, Shirl wrote on our church bulletin: “Ain’t you ‘shamed, you sleepyhead?” This made me pretty much unravel. I got thumped again. Savagely. Hilarious! We stifled ourselfs by biting the backs of our hands. Afterwards, we compared, studying whose skin had turnt reddest, counting girlish teeth marks. Finally, service ended, Pember woke with a pig grunt and stared at his ruined tie and hid it under his coat, and we nearbout perished from the humor of it, tears all down our cheeks. “Did the spirit descend on you two?” Shirl’s heavy mother touched our wet faces. Shirley, better at faking than me, nodded Yes. When adult eyes got right in front of mine, I shook my head No, admitting, “Mr. Pember drooled, during.” “Well,” Shirl’s momma said, “the Lord sure moves in strange and mysterious ways,” and laughed. Onct home, my mother burned my knuckles good, the ruler.

  HAVE I mentioned Shirley’s looks? Oh, Lord God, that Shirl was the very ore to make a princess of. Poppa bragged: My pal was so much prettier than any highborn Summit Avenue girl, it won’t funny. When rich ladies put white frocks on their daughters, Pop claimed ladies just prayed (if Episcopalians did) that their lumpy girls’d turn out half so fine as our Shirley in simple school clothes.

  Still, Shirl’s dresses were never exactly plain. Her hefty mother nursed ambitions for the one child. The Mrs. forever added cheap trims, brass lockets, net panels onto poor Shirl’s sleeves, hems, collars. Shirl was forced to wear straw hats in warm seasons, furry felt ones fall and winter. Her smocks stuttered with frills. Tired cloth roses drooped everywheres. Talk about colorful, her frocks tended towards your raw mint greens, overly pinks. Shirl had one outfit made of bitter yellow that could made a citrus grower pucker. Local folks pitied a child forced to walk around like some dime store’s notions counter. Fingering the latest fringe, some asked, “Aren’t you hot?” But Shirl, pure dignity, never onct complained. When Shirley Williams visited us, Momma often eased into my room’s open doorway, mother’s mouth set, hands clasped before her like some solo soprano waiting for her cue. She’d come to check on Shirl’s latest getup. I knew and it burned me. Shirl smiled her two-and-a-half-dimple grin, “Your mother acts so nicely towards me. She really takes an interest.”

  “Right,” said I.

  Later, alone with me, Momma played piano whilst explaining just how sad Shirl and her mother really were. We’d earlier seen my friend downtown strolling arm in arm betwixt two huge adoring parents. “You know your Shirley’s mother’s idea of perfect beauty?” Momma asked. “Goldilocks is.”

  “That’s mean!” I backed off, pointing.

  Music ceased. Momma turned my way. “You’re right, of course. And I repent, Lucille. It’s just, I want so much for you. I get ill-tempered when things interfere.”

  I studied the freckled hand I’d pointed with. “Ain’t Shirley’s fault. You should be glad somebody still comes around. Blame me. I look funny. I talk bass ackwards. It’s me but, Momma? I try.” I poked one ivory high low note, I felt soiled and weak. She leaned forwards, lifted my either wiry braid, wound them into overlapping circles on my scalp. I reached up to touch this topknot, grinning, “Feels like a beanie.”

  “Tiara,” she corrected me. Momma bent off her ebony stool. I looked at its feet, claw-and-ball and brass. She kissed my coarse tight crown. Momma kissed and kissed it. “You’ll do,” she purred. I saw: Her eyes were closed.

  A TRAIN wreck brought my folks together. Momma was twenty-two then, already a old maid by Falls’ standards. She’d been pursued by several likely boys who’d scented the inheritance. Not one fellow interested her. “Clothes-store mannequins,” she called them privately. Bored, she went on a trip with her older male cousin. This was a country outing into the godforsaken terrain near Bear Grass, North Carolina. Backwoods, all ponds there stagnant. The rich reckless older cousin owned a duck-hunting lodge out there.

  To make the long story quick: Momma’s fifty-year-old
cousin, jilted by a young lady friend, got drunk and—with my terrified momma in his buggy—someway decided to race a northbound train toward the Bear Grass crossroads. He did not actually decide this till he saw the train. His horse, it never decided. The black train barely noticed. Momma did. Her screams were mistaken for the crossing whistle by passersby. The drunk cousin’s timing proved terrible, fatal. His horse, forced to turn right at the crossroads, was struck at once, so was the dandy cousin. Momma got thrown free of tracks. She later said she recalled last thing, one thought: “So this is flight.”

  When she woke nine hours later, she saw a makeshift splint—lathing and newspapers—already improving her broken right arm. “Lucille, I found myself in a tiny filthy farm hut. I’d seen better-looking stables but the humble folk there did act so generous. I hardly understood their speech. First I thought I was in Heaven, and that Heaven was a kind of Peasant Europe. Everything the color of straw. There was a rough boy hovering over me, pressing cool cloths to my forehead. My first sentence, hours later, was to ask his name. ‘Samuel,’ he said, and he winked. I laughed and fainted. I woke knowing more. The boy understood nothing of who I was, what I stood to inherit. Finally he asked me whom to notify. First I couldn’t remember, then pretended not to know. I pretended that for four sweet days. My poor parents suffered so during those days. But Samuel’s wit, his … well, his personal heat—contrasted so with my stuffed-shirt suitors from Summit. Samuel told the most charming stories. I drew strength from them. Especially the ones about cunning woodland animals. Delicious. I rested in the sun, my eyes closed, listening. I felt like the child I’d been before a childhood accident I had. The older peasant couple gave me milk, still warm, directly from the cow that looked to be as much a hick as its owner, ribs all showing. Slowly, I grew stronger and finally felt quite certain. I never understood one word his parents said. Their kindness was replete but they were, well, primitivo, my dear Lucille. Your poor father seems to have been allotted the collected wit of the last four Bear Grass generations. One day he carried me, bodily, out into the tomato patch, direct sun. Tomato plants have an erotic odor. I asked him to please brush my hair. When he was behind me, doing so with a currying comb for horses, I believe (which I preferred to his mother’s far-from-hygienic hairbrush), I joked about someday finding the courage to ask a boy such as himself to marry a girl such as I. He did not say ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Try me.’ It was the most precious thing I’d ever heard. I turned. He lowered the currying comb. He had tears in his eyes.