Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

  World

  How to Leave

  For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told.

  —PSALM 90:9

  THIS is how God explained it was my time to run away: Ned’s bandages were all off and he felt he looked okay, Lou had finally won her local Spelling Bee, and though she’d just lost the state part (giving the world “plebeian” one more “b” than it deserved), she still got the tricounty trophy and shined it twice a week till the brass rubbed off. Twins’ croup was breaking up. My potato salad cut healed to a mere scar. And, at long last, the leak over my kitchen ceiling had been patched—by me—with a bucket of tar and a fistful of brick dust from our vacant lot. It seemed a right good stopping point between disasters. I figured: Lucy, better clear out now before the next batch starts. The thing about setbacks: In a family with eight living children—there are more coming.

  At my kitchen table, after midnight, I drank a cup of tea, decided to make sure the young ones had decent winter clothes. Castalia would housesit till my husband decided who’d mind our brood or which orphanage to use, whichever happened first. I knew it was time.—Sure, I’d considered taking my babies along. But, honey, running away with eight children, that ain’t running away—it’s moving.

  I’d started to feeling like a waning moon that might never come back full.

  THE DAY I packed, I saw a newspaper at Lucas’: how a woman in Ohio had killed six. She took a hatchet to her husband and five children while they slept. Police asked her why. Woman said, calm as you please, “Because things were too hard for them alone. And I couldn’t find a way to help.”

  The Herald Traveler showed her picture. You know? she looked nice. Had on a pretty suit. When I read all this, when it made perfect sense to me, I knew that—as a decent wife and mother—was time to go.

  I sized up the honeymoon carpetbag, its tapestry showed roses. It was already long out of style. How fast things had moved. Everything but me. I made no plans beyond the need to clear out quick. The kids were tucked in. I’d given them hot milk so they’d sleep through my goodbyes. I’d made Cassie take money to come tend them till Captain got back from the hog growers’ convention up in Norfolk. I’d read the leaflet they sent. The meeting was called “Recent Advances in Technical Butchery.” I just laughed. He give me his worried guilty look. I kept thinking about the Ohio lady who’d killed her own brood. She’d done it because she couldn’t spare them, couldn’t save them from the world’s messy future waiting, a set trap, for each.—Packing my best things, I felt excited and rotten.

  I tiptoed around and kissed my children as they slept, first the girls’ long row of beds and then my boys’. I righted the cane that’d tipped to the floor beside Ned’s bed. I said the full name of each child aloud, and though I am not now nor never will be a Catholic, I made the sign of the cross in the air above their blankets. Humid milky smells lifted from the covers, reminding me of Shirley. But I felt less emotions than I’d hoped. Soon as you plan your feelings in advance, child, they’ll go substandard on you. Different, anyhow.—At least I hadn’t hurt them or killed them. Unlike certain others. That was something, anyhow.

  Was a cool clear night. I had most of a moon to guide me. Falls, North Carolina, at 2:49 a.m. looked new, more like I’d pictured Europe. I headed to the station on foot. Felt scared that cabdrivers (the town had two) might recognize me and get nosy. I swung my carpet sack at arm’s end, like a child toting her book bag away from school, not towards it. Before, when I’d imagined my big getaway, it meant foreign adventures. Funny, kind new friends were eating in restaurants with me and laughing. But the nearer escape got, the quieter my picture of it grew. By now I just saw a rented efficiency I’d have sorhewheres. A single bed, one chair and table, a bureau with a oval mirror to back it up, some one window looking out on anything green, just a place for a afternoon nap with no interruptions. One longish nap alone. I didn’t want much, I told myself. Was that much?

  I wore my black straw hat, my finest gray suit. I wondered how long I’d last without seeing the children. (I tried not to think how they would feel waking to find Castalia scrambling their eggs.) I imagined my babies to be some kind of vitamins, a necessary food I’d shrivel without.

  Still, maybe a diet wouldn’t kill me. If I stayed, I’d hurt him or me, or maybe even them. I felt sure of some rash act, though I knew that toting a hatchet bed to bed would always be beyond me. Your Lucy walked.

  Took the long back way to the depot. I’d saved one hundred and five dollars even. Seemed like a lot to me then, maybe because of Cap’s recent losses, maybe because of the six years it’d taken to stash that amount without feeling I’d cheated the children out of extras. Before leaving I’d showed Cassie the coffee can in the pantry marked “For Lou, my oldest daughter’s education.” In there, two hundred and forty-two dollars and some cents. Head to toe, my girl, a spelling champ, was college material. Twelve or twenty cents at a time, I’d squirreled aside her tuition and my getaway money. I figured Ned, even considering the accident, given his brightness and beauty, would win a scholarship someplace. Lou, maybe not. I knew her father couldn’t pay.

  Dogs barked at hearing my good shoes squeak. I come on a tree house in the elm where Shirl and me had built one years back. Up there, near the road, two boys sat smoking. One heard me, and he struck a match to question who I was. I stood looking up. I don’t know what made me tell them. “I’m running away from home,” I said. “Good,” one called right down. I didn’t recognize them. They were about Ned’s age. Eleven is the perfect age for a boy. “Where to?” the other asked. I swung my satchel back and forth. I felt very free and nervy. Imagine, out at 3 a.m. talking to people I didn’t even know by name. I hollered, “Where sounds good to you?”

  “Florida,” they both said nearbout in unison. They must have been talking about it right when I stopped, about where they’d go, given the ticket. Everybody has some escape route they would pick, their alternative to the humdrum terror of right here.

  It made me feel better, how I’d told my plan, how I’d asked their advice. Almost made me feel I could head back home now. Even getting this far was somewhat satisfying. But I reminded myself: Troubles are troubles and plans are plans. I forced myself to hike toward the station. One boy hollered, “Good luck, but hey, supplies, come back.” They dropped a cigarette for me. I thanked them, tucked it in my bag.

  I hadn’t set foot into a train depot since the honeymoon trip fourteen years before. Our Falls station, clean and white and gingerbready, always looked beautiful from outside. Inside needed painting. The waiting-room ceiling was steep. Big fedora-brim flakes of enamel had popped loose, like trying their own getaway.

  Only seven people sat inside, not counting the one caged with the tickets. I’d expected a minor Ellis Island crowd, a little bustle, your finer clothes, steamer trunks marked with foreign stickers. Something.

  Instead, two old men I knew from around town stretched out on benches. Their possessions rested bunched in sacks and shoe boxes nearby them. I’d gone to school with the daughter of the one snoring. I felt ashamed for her and him and for our city. Since so few local people traveled, ever—few would know that this fellow, so polite downtown, always giving chewing gum to my children, was really somebody homeless.

  I eased away from the man I knew and who knew me. I settled near a dark woman in a loud tatty shawl. She had two children and, while she slept, sat breast-feeding another. A suitcase rested beside her and a hot plate in the box it’d come in. Mrs. Williams. Something about how greedy her smacking child sounded, how his mother’s eyes pressed shut, mouth slung open like amazed to again be in transit. Her pretty oldest girl kept kicking a cigar butt back and forth. The child seemed to recognize me, winked.

  I rushed over and read every place the Orange Blossom Special stopped. Eeny, meeny, miney, mo. I liked the train’s name. I had carried a orange blossom bouquet in my wedding. Remembering the smell still pleased me, despite eve
rything. I chose St. Petersburg because I’d once heard Poppa say, “St. Pete.” Going to see St. Pete made me think of heavenly reward. I’d picked my next hometown with no real reason, the way Cap sometimes bet on horses for their catchy names alone. Now that I knew my destiny and destination, I wanted mainly to talk.

  The train would leave in an hour and a half. I saw a few stray men and boys trail into the station’s men’s room and linger there a while. I saw a handsome woman in her fifties. She wore all shades of off-white, was busy repacking her one suitcase. A undignified task—your personal things spread out along a bench for all to see. But she conducted herself with a style downright royal. Between trains, taking her own time, she was a tall edgy white woman, tidying up. Her shoulders and fine neck she held all as one unit. Even in her mumbly state, she presented herself like somebody entitled to high society but on the lam from it. She wore all her jewelry at onct. It won’t safe-deposit-box fine—it won’t bad either. Way better than anything I owned except my carated engagement diamond. She had on pale fingerless gloves nobody’d worn since the Jackson administration. “Morning,” I said. “And where are you going?” I didn’t know how travelers acted. She took no notice. I’d been willing to wing it, though I saw I’d failed. I stood here, both hands clutching my satchel bunched before me. I just smiled. She gave me a look weary and familiar (like I’m a type of train rider she knows coming and going). Then she bent back to reorganizing white clothes. I saw they were finely made but could sure use several serious washings. Maybe they were too far gone already. Close as I stood, I couldn’t help but see that—pinned to every piece—a bit of scrap paper described it: “White blse w. Belgn lace cffs cllr.” Odd, since one glance’d tell you that.

  “Sorry,” I said (about speaking), and turned aside towards other benches, when—low, so nobody else could hear—she goes, “You’re running away.”

  I swiveled back, waited, a little scared, my chin lifted.

  She counted on her fingers. “Too many children. A husband who’s ceased knowing you. No strength. Everything’s sad, routine.”

  I nodded. “You’re a wizard,” I said.

  “Just a woman with a memory, child. Take my advice.” Her voice sounded ripe and powerful.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Don’t.”

  I asked why not. She settled beside her open suitcase. She patted the worn oak seat, showing where I should sit. I did. She looked around like afraid of being overheard or busted in on. Our shoulders lightly touched, I trusted her. Still refolding her fine dingy satin things, she give me the hem of a slip. I held it whilst she pressed the upper half to mine. We worked through her clothes, refolding as she spoke. It was a wonderful chore to do with a stranger, who is not one afterwards. She said, the way lots of older people will when they commence their telling, how she’d once been good-looking or better (you never heard me say that, did you, darling?). She claimed that three or four folks with extra-good eyes had called her full out beautiful in her prime. I told her it still showed, but she gave me a slighting wave of one glove.

  “I only mention it since it matters in my story of leaving, and what went wrong.”

  Her voice was so refined. Her nails looked grimy as a miner’s. I felt ashamed to notice.

  Well, the lady said as how she married, moved to Baltimore, had three fine children, soon felt trapped, lost, and wasted. And tempted. To try anything. Anything but what she had day in, day out. One Saturday morning at a street fair, waiting for her young ones to get off the carousel, bored with waving at them every time around, she was approached by a gentleman and dandy, a man of commerce. He acted so nice. She saw him three times in secret, finally went to his rented rooms once. She bought the best stationery Baltimore had to offer, wadded up twelve sheets before she got the note right. While her children were at school, husband on the job, she left the note. It said, “I simply must.” She took the express to Niagara Falls with her notions salesman. He was ten years younger than herself. He loved her, seemed to really see her as she was, a person full of promise, depth, and sense. Without even being asked, he ofttimes did pocket magic tricks, tipped his hat to strangers, was everybody’s idea of a man’s choice companion and any woman’s darling. He wore a jade monkey on his watch chain. Said he’d got it, not at a pawnshop, but in Singapore proper. He planned to take his new love to the Orient come spring. He promised this, he showed receipts for down payments with a steamship company out of Seattle. She felt rewarded and somehow famous. She slept late. He bought her fine white brocades, lacy blouses, and a little jar of face paint which she’d never worn before. She turned heads. She gave her old ginghams and bright-sprigged calicoes to the poor. He worked days. He found a job up there in Canada hawking industrial laundry products and restaurant supplies.

  One summer evening, rocking on each other, fastened perfect, she heard him cry out his pleasure, extra loud, too. Then she overheard herself join in even noisier till they both sobbed and gasped for all the boardinghouse to hear. Not caring, even proud. Next morning while dressing for work, her young man found a neighbor’s note shoved under their door. It said, “You two lovebirds sounded like cats. Cats. Some restraint, please. This is Canada.” He handed the paper to her, still in bed. She cried, shamed, till she heard his low laugh. He’d put on her best hat and paced in a braggart clowning way. He made her laugh. But, later, seen alone on the stairs by other shy tenants, greeted by the wizened old Indian janitor, who smiled, she felt right notorious, right unworthy.

  She took a trolley to the Falls theirselves. She’d seen them many times but never tired of their force. She claimed you could hear their roar a mile off, easy—said you could see their white steam rolling to a mountain’s height, steam as alive with rainbows as a greenhouse full of plants. At a overlook cave, she read this tourist plaque that told how a young girl onct slipped off this very observation deck, how her older brother jumped in and pulled her back to safety not twenty feet from the brink. Other sightseers formed a human chain and tugged the children safe ashore. Standing, reading this, shielded from spray by a new white parasol, she felt she had experienced a sign. She missed her children with a wallop long postponed. The Falls’ roar seemed an abscess hollow, groaning to be filled. Her children’s favorite phrases, their flukes of coloring, the very way each slept at night, curled in, sprawled out—came to her in a great and dizzying rush. She closed her parasol and used it as a prop to keep her standing. The white dress was soon covered with fine haze. Mist weighed her mutton sleeves and chilled her neck. The heroism of leaving wore off all at once—like, she explained, a prescription you cannot refill. And when she passed an arcade mirror, she saw how her face’s rouge had beaded in this haze, was bleeding—dainty—down her jaw. She left a note (on fine paper) for her young man. It said she still loved him. It swore she’d be back by return train. Her letter ended: “I forgot something.”

  She took a express to Baltimore, caught her a taxi to the old address. The landlady wouldn’t open the door. Neighbors came out, saw her in the hallway, and—clucking—hid from her. Everybody felt she was worse than a murderer to leave her children and a good man. Her family had moved. They’d left no forwarding address. She traveled by a local train to her husband’s parents, their farm in far-off Indiana. It took three days. The in-laws wouldn’t come out onto their porch to even see her. They hollered through their mail slot—not even they knew where their son and grandchildren had got off to. They also waited to receive the new address. They blamed her, and said so with a frankness she admired more than herself. Through the brass slot, three small framed photos of her face and shoulders dropped. Glass became blue powder at her feet.

  She caught the fastest rail connections back to Canada. She’d promised to be home by return train. She vowed she would treat her salesman now as brother, child, and lover, he would be her family. The key to their room had been changed. A girl on crutches and a heavy man answered. On her former dressing table, she saw a parrot cage. She found that her yo
ung salesman had quit his job, cleared out. He’d stored her bags with the janitor. This man, a East Indian with a bad limp, led her to the basement. When he saw how sad she looked, he admitted that her friend had given him a two-dollar tip. Now, studying her face, the old man offered to give back half. She thanked him but refused the money, said how very kind he was. Then, in the dark storeroom, he told her he had heard her through the walls—enjoying a certain thing. He tried to touch her neck, her bodice. She screamed at him. Nobody understood. She’d been pawed and underestimated all her life. The salesman had left no word, though she suspected the Far East. With her luggage, she revisited the Falls, deciding to either find some decent plan or jump.—“And so, my dear, when you ask me where I’m going, you see I can’t say—and not from being rude, more from not actually knowing quite where the next hint might come from. I wait for leads, the news of everybody’s whereabouts. Oh, they’re out there, I know. I first hired a Canadian detective, then a man from Baltimore. But I ran out of money before either turned up anything. I accept jobs—I was a governess once. I’ve been a paid lady’s companion. I get clues from time to time. A girl named what I named my girl graduated from Bryn Mawr two Junes back. My salesman turned up on the payroll of a lumber firm in Eugene, Oregon. I took the train there. But nobody would talk. You can lose your place, you know. It seems there’s one groove mapped out for each of us. I slipped free of mine. I made one wrong connection. I cannot find the right track now. I can’t find it.”

  Then she described her husband and young children in surprising and complete detail. Next she told me each tic, joke, and plaid-suit color of her missing salesman. But I felt sure her descriptions were thirty-some years past due. She said that if I saw them, any of them, or even possible look-alikes, I ought to contact her at once. She said she would jot down her address for me. The lady found a scrap of envelope in a depot ashtray. Tongue pressed between teeth, she did a very careful scrawl. The dark child shuffled past in slippers, still dreamy, still kicking around that vile black cigar butt. Her mother kept nodding so far forward, baby still sucking her, I feared she’d lean across and smother it. Local boys in nice clothes and in shabby ones kept piling into the men’s room looking glazed and guilty, coming back out in pairs. Must have been fifteen in there by now, doing what? I saw our superintendent of schools, who wrote the Sleepover bulletin, father of four, slip in, glancing left and right to see if he’d been spotted, and at 4 a.m. What loneliness drove people to do this, and right in my own Falls, who’d have guessed? Everyone but me seemed homeless. She handed me the paper, she acted pleased to have yet another person on the lookout for her absent ones. The scrap said: “Contact Mrs. Carlotta Webb, care of the Atlantic Coastline Railroad (will be in club cars mostly).”