Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (11 page)

WEEKLY
practice with Winona (all those Thursdays among canary cages), it paid off during a late-night dinner at the Mayor’s mansion (anniversary of Antietam). Marsden had drunk a extra glass of claret. He sat listening to the gent on his left, a man who’d never fought for anything more pressing than attention at such refined civilian parties. The mustached man made a quip about why we’d lost. Said our Southern aristocrats had been way too genteeeel to butcher like your cruder Yankee bulldogs would.

Marsden’s fist went up. All talk hushed. He brought that hand down, grabbed a butter knife, chimed his emptied claret glass, said real loud, “I object, sir. Case in point, sir …”

Willie told a short if right heroic story. Next he recalled a second, longer one—and a third. Seemed a backlog waited, each tale with its hand up, calling, “Me. Me next, sir.” (The tales he told were by now worked smooth as glass, perfected in a lady’s parlor then a lady’s tent.)

The Mayor’s other guests slowly turned chairs to face a local fellow who,
during the fish course and for his total lifetime previous, had been known as the silent type—then, since the war, as the strong and silent type. Even the offending dandy tipped back in his chair, crossed his arms, and listened, his head tilted like a dare. This was the beginning of it. Seemed public storytelling was a contagion young Marsden had picked up from gimpy Courthouse regulars, from the hurt and hurtful mother of a missing loved one.

The man talked real halting at first. Maybe the years’ silence gave his speech—when it finally reached others’ air—such feist and wallop. Willie’s style was more straightforward than my own. I love the flourish of beginnings. He was mad for middles. Went straight there. Telling gets to be a habit. Soon it seemed natural to him and others, Private Willie Marsden’s talking at last.

HAD TO BE
night before he’d tell.

At the banquet, at your table, he’d place a fork opposite a soup bowl and make it be a tree beside a lake. Pepper from the shaker he’d sprinkle out to draw with, one antlike line crossing tablecloth connected snipers’ willow roost to where snipers’ shells would have to hit. Afterwards, a hostess cleaning up might sit at Cap Marsden’s empty place, might study a pepper line, would touch it with her fingertip, maybe sneeze. Women longed to nurse him back to health, like peace was some simple rhubarb tonic, a recipe known from the inside out to females only. Men respected Cap, meaning they were just a little scared of him. They never onct corrected his war dates or place names, though all men felt they were true scholars of the fight. They never interrupted. Marsden had grown a lot. And when the gent got to rolling with his newfound battle tales, he looked even bulkier. Poor man left no fact out, couldn’t. He’d hang forward, sometimes doing cannon sounds (you never laughed). Told how loud cannon concussions made horses’ toilet habits change and nobody judged it unrefined, Cap’s mentioning this even at Preacher’s house. Cap would get to breathing from lower in, like a singer will, eyes half wet, him soon rocking back and forwards, with your finest crockery rearranged before him. Soup tureen: Sherman, who had burned Marsden’s mother’s china-doll face. The vinegar cruet was rebel General Johnston, who’d failed to prevent a pale beauty’s being cooked. With tableware mustered into being serious battle-map toys, us guests leaned toward candlelight and him.—Oh, honey, everybody, ears to kneecaps, was soon cobbled with goose bumps. You admired the man about as much as you pitied him.

I COME IN
around here. Housebroken, the one with pigtails, third from the end, all eyes.

HE DIDN’T
clean war up a bit, nor did he add a drop of extra crimson. Just told it. Like the fellow says, facts are plain unbeatable. How some women
fought in the war dressed as men. Nobody found out their real sex and they were right heroic and—after Appomattox—at least one brave lady-man-soldier of a Yank was offered a pension and died with the name of a regiment carved on her marker. Fact. Look it up. How—at Shiloh, after two short hours of battle, so much lead had flown through air at one single level—a whole woods, every single old-old tree and slender sapling, was sheared off even, perfect like the Lord’s professional hedge clippers had swooped out of Heaven and passed over, strict.

Fact.

HIS THIRD
tale of that first talkative evening opened something like this:

“They’d get too close. You’d yell for them to stay back. They wouldn’t. You saw they had their muskets ready. Officers forced you to. Or maybe knowing that your friend nearby was watching. It could have been the scariness of someone’s rushing over the hill at you. You could plainly see their faces. It might well be a nice face. It was. Sometimes a perfectly splendid face. Two of my three were a good deal better-looking than myself, which I handily admit is not that difficult. One wounded Yankee boy (shot by myself) later offered me his pocket watch. He was nearly as pretty as a girl, with silver-blond hair, not just the yellow kind which is certainly quite fine enough. After my dealings with this Northern boy—who actually gave me his watch—after that, why, every single time, I bent close, I checked. I felt it was my duty to remember the exact features of each fellow I shot.

“At that age, what did I know? They trained us to. The Lieutenant said, ‘Don’t pull on your trigger so hard, son, don’t jerk it, Willie, that’ll knock your sights all off. Just squeeze it, squeeze it like you’d squeeze your gal back home.’

“I told him that I’d joined our honorable Confederacy at thirteen, sir. I’d come in with my friend, sir, the little one over there. And, sir? I didn’t exactly have ‘a gal.’ At least, not yet, sir. No time to.

“‘Well,’ he said. ‘Squeeze it like you love it. Nice and easy. Squeeze that trigger like it’s everything you love. You do, as a gentleman, believe in love? You do love something, right, son?’

“‘Yes sir!’ barks I.

“And two months after this particular shooting lesson, it happened. The Yankee I mentioned, one rendered an easier target by virtue of his bright watch chain and silver-blond curls, he walked directly my way. ‘Go back,’ I cried. ‘Go back or I’ll definitely have to, probably.’ Well, he did not. I studied him along my sight—my hands they shook so. I was all but spastic, I was. The noise out there alone. I was in a hole and I let my musket’s stock rest on the lip of the hole. Dirt at least was stationary except during jolts from the artillery breaking all around us. ‘I am going to count to ten, or else.’ I yelled it and he heard me too. I saw him hear me. Why didn’t he stop then? I would’ve preferred that, I would have infinitely preferred not
to hurt anybody. I hadn’t previously. A flea I really wouldn’t’ve. Ask anyone local from before. I maintain that few people really want to, few of those who kill actually plan it. I begged that he not force me. He had a chance to go in any direction but my direction. But here he came. My finger, though in place, knew it absolutely couldn’t. Even as it closed on metal, no, it simply could not. Unworthy of me, of my people. How harmless to contract the central joint of your right index finger. Here, you all try that, up and down this splendid table, let me see. Fine. I like to view others doing that in our present peaceful time. Ladies especially. You, madam, on the end, might I see your pretty forefinger do one minor little crooking? And the freckled little girl down there. Thank you. Yes, that helps. More claret for anybody else? It’s really nothing, is it?—curl one digit inward.—There’s a moment when you simply can’t. It is followed by the moment when you know, to live you must.

“Oh my. I do seem to be holding forth here, do I not? Forgive me, mustn’t really. Unlike myself. I know better. I was thirteen years old. It was difficult but also simpler maybe. Hard to explain. You should have been there. But,
No
. What am I saying? You
shouldn’t’ve
been there. I should not have been.—Here endeth the lesson as they say on Church Street. I’ll stop. Sorry. Growing garish in my waning years here.”

Other diners did want to hear the rest.

This was at the Mayor’s and it was late. The company was reasonably civilized and so the company begged for it. After sips of claret and several reassurances, he continued his murdering, his telling us it.

This beginning, spoken after dinner, during coffee and cigars, soon brought three black servants to a standstill at the table’s edges, made certain ladies sit more forward—not caring how candlelight might show off the defects of a person’s doubling chins and the crepe under your eyes. His telling the rest, it made men toy with watch fobs or cuff links, needing to be occupied, manually. The gathering had
asked
Marsden to continue, right? Probably it’d be better for
him
too. Men who hadn’t gone to war felt shy about that now. Ones who had, they sat here beginning to remember things they’d chose not to, not inside Falls’ city limits, which meant safety and a lawn-green truce. Nobody rose during the rest of Captain’s sad little tale, nobody mentioned babysitters or went home early. Instead they kept very still and still more still. They took it like a medicine, a purge. This man was a big man, but the intimacy of what he admitted for all of us to hear, it was too huge even for so quilted a gent. But it sounded girlish, murder. Sounded personal. His tales were about how killing somebody kills the killed one—that’s plain enough—but more about how the one that kills is killed then inch by inch, whittled down—even during a season when such killing is commendable. So, this handsome fellow was a killer, yet his table manners stayed right good throughout. In ending, Marsden turned to the sissified civilian and said, “So, sir, a body’s being genteeel, sir, doesn’t really figure
in, sir, as I have suggested. Everybody here? forgive my going on. It is the anniversary of Antietam. That’s what did it to me, I fear.”

WILL
had departed Falls the hushed and uglier pal of a perfect sleek little soprano. Now, grown, minus the friend, once he quit being a ventriloquist’s dummy and finally found his voice, it worked.

Came the day he hit thirty-six, November 1885 (he was a Scorpio all over, sugar—whether you credit that mess or no), ex-Private Willie Marsden had been advanced by his excellent memory and a better imagination up to officer already. (Me? I was off somewheres getting myself diaper-trained.) By the time the century changed (oh, honey, we had such hopes for this one!), one rickety little private had been turned into a brassbound captain. His having money helped. Willie’s daytime hush made his evening speaking voice seem more a event. The years had promoted Private Marsden, those and his way with his war’s rude lore.

All his: “The Shoe Fits,” “When the Colors Changed,” “The Tailor and the Leg,” “Sherman’s Barbequeing Mother,” a couple dozen others—I yet have them all by heart. Thinking back on his roster of favorites, it feels to Lucy here like Captain Marsden’s bruise-gray Hit Parade. I can yet sing each tune—his way and mine.

One such—more or less in his own pitch and manner—still runs:

I
MAGINE
escaping from prison by walking through its open doors and you ain’t even running. Guards let you loose for playing like it’s regular: getting everything on earth you want. My husband, thirteen, plus a sidekick got chucked into a Yankee fortress. Escape, Willie told me later, seemed a form of flying at ground level. The hum of the world—river’s running, bugs at click—seemed alarms that were
about
to screech news of your getaway but somehow didn’t and became chums, pulling for you.

You’ve heard it said of some friend, “He’d give you a arm and a leg”? My husband claimed: The worse times are, the better friends you make. Lately when I read the newspapers, I figure we must be living through the golden age of buddyhood. Moral is: Hold on to your friends. You sure need them now.

AT WAR
, Willie was a kid who said very little and feared very much. The more spooked he got, the fewer words he risked. He soon seemed mute. Big-eyed, he took in all the sights. Bodies stacked like cordwood, human hair snagged on barbed-wire fences: Those would scare anybody witless. His best hometown friend had just been shot. Wee Willie yet wandered in the haze from losing Ned. Our living boy had new beaverish adult teeth, a tendency to trip, and this squinty grin that tried to ward off harm. However charming, a smile cannot make friends with minié balls.

After his pal’s death, Will found a new favorite in one Corporal S. Smith. This tailor-farmer hailed from North Carolina too. At forty, Salvador Smith was redheaded, moved all gangly, and had fathered six girls he talked about a lot. If you didn’t watch him, he’d show you his daughters’ daguerreotypes right during battle. Seemed like being a father—far from home—Sal had all this leftover guarding energy. Most of it he offered to my shivery cheerful Willie. Each night, before Corporal Smith could get to sleep, he made a walking tour of camp. He did it the way he’d checked on outbuildings and the barn of his sweet-potato farm near New Bern, North Carolina. Sal Smith would stop by Willie’s tent, would ease two feet from the boy’s cot and stand there listening hard for sleep’s steady breathing. Sal liked to consider he’d someway “adopted” a young fellow soldier. Just made things more interesting, gave you this extra stake. (The world is full of our unofficial “chosen” children, child.) Sal Smith kept such attentions secret—but Willie was awake
while Sal stood guard. The boy would fake mildish snores. And as can happen, in acting asleep to soothe your nearest well-wisher, a body sometimes drifts right off.

WILL
forever loved Sal Smith for how—captured together—they got loose so perfect.

Simple: the two were on a stranger’s farm chasing chickens to fill the company pot. Nothing more glamorous than that, nothing less necessary. Suddenly, where two cornered brown hens should be, twelve boots—connected to six Yanks and, higher, six muskets aimed. “Nobody home but us chickens. Come with us, gray boys.”

The Yanks’ prisoner-of-war camp was due south of Charlottesville. A girls’ academy had been turned into this fort of bars and baffles. Led in, hands raised, the Rebs were brought before one Major Digby. He was all oratory and side whiskers. (Not to be confused with the General Burnside that barbers later named the sideburn for.) As Digby grilled the two about encampments, fortifications, their names and civilian jobs—how they might be most useful as prisoners—fellows studied the Major’s nasty uniform. A rip run crosswise, opening his tunic. Though Digby wore dyed-to-match blue long Johns underneath, he did look real shabby. Plus, his bare left knee played peekaboo through holes.