Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (120 page)

I said,
“That’s
for sure.”

Lou soon had kindling glowing and a wad of
Herald Travelers
joining in and all my other kids held a log apiece and stood there crying waiting to be useful. I took them off to one side. We’d never been a family for hugging constantly and kissy-kissy and like that. They dropped their fuel and clung to me. In trying and purge the house I had forgot them. I felt bad as they hung on to me. I told them nobody was to blame. I lied to them because they had to hear that at their age. For six minutes, we were fused there, turned aside from gathered watchers.

Since the day Cap’s guns got shown in
Liberty
, new men had been filing in, reverent, to view them. These same fellows now stared envy at these museum pieces nude here in sunlight, lit by nearby flames. I made many dashing trips. Out came ivory derringers that slipped into my apron pockets, cherry-wood dueling pistols with cursive curlicue ivory garlands inlaid, two German revolvers black as oil and snub-nosed like terrible lizards and so cold to the touch. I lifted my apron’s outmost ends and lugged still more, knowing that my bare thighs probably showed, not caring who saw. These legs’d stopped interesting anybody long long ago. Me especially.

The children tried being useful and so were picking up what rifles I dropped. I told the grownups worried all around, “See they hold those by
the handles, not their tips, whatever. Baby, not by the tip.” To show you how stunned my kids were, Baby—our dramatic one—had said not a word, had shed no tear but ran everywhere helping, dead white.

I got a shovel and begun digging a hole. Then—disorganized—I laid first rifles into the decent little fire Loud made. One sinewy black teenager, eyeing dueling pistols, he lunged over, said, “They loaded, any of them? Don’t be sticking guns in no fire, all these folks around, they go off,
then
where you be?”

I thanked him, mortified right proper. I ordered all the things unloaded. I was taking charge, but of what? Where was any help for me? The bullet check let men do what they’d longed for, pick up each gun, crack open the works, look down its sight. Unloaded ones among flames won’t burning too good. I saw now, even charred, the things would still have worked, metal latchings stay intact even on a charcoaled stock.

So I hollered, “Take them off from here. Get them far from this house and my children. Go to the river with them, melt them down, I don’t care. Just let it all be over please. Hide them.”

The colored teenager grabbed them cherry dueling pistols right out of the fire. They burned him till he jammed them under his belt like a pirate. Boy wagged his hurt hands but was smiling at his luck. I knew those guns had garland inlay on them and might be called works of art, but any artwork on a weapon had misunderstood something basic and, for me, won’t.

Boy ran off fast and two white men after him, keeping track for Cap. I saw that. Other fellows lugging cordwood armfuls now went zipping off in all directions whilst eyeing who’d got what. Once men stepped off our land, I seen them halt, admiring their own loot. Some were standing there across Summit’s sidewalk, wearing Sunday suits, a Bible tucked under one arm and aiming their ill-gotten guns up elm treetops. The wives beside them looked back over here at me, very very tired. I saw what a mistake I’d made. Once you got the weapons, what do you
do
with them?

I sat right beside the fire still burning peaceful. Nearby was one old pillow slip the kids’d stuffed with sand and pine straw to be home base. I crawled over to it, hunkered here, seeking safety. My children come and bunched around me, in a circle, like being my guards until my mind would clear. Resting under the swing made me think of Mr. Stevenson’s poems someway. I said one, numb, trying to calm my kids:

This crowd of spectators watched us from the sidewalk. I heard Ruth’s phone keep ringing. More news I could not bear.

Lou stood beside me and her knees were there. I put my arms around
the backs of both her knees and hugged her to me, one ear tipped against her stomach as she stroked my hair. She said, “Let’s us go in the house. They’re looking, Momma. This is bad. We’re outdoors.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and tried standing. I saw the crowd, everybody afraid of me, my bloody hand worse now, stains all over.

Louisa helped me up. I bumped into the rope swing’s tire. It now seemed some dark lynching victim. I filed indoors with my kids. We moved like people ashamed of ourselves. We were ashamed. We had let this happen. We could not clean up after ourselfs.

CASTALIA
, ripe in mink, winded from her trudge uphill, both hands still coated with flour from baking, right massively appeared, put Louisa in charge of other kids, sent strangers from my kitchen, guided me to the front parlor. I always kept it covered with cloths to spare my best furniture till fancy enough company eventually came. They never did.

Castalia heaved down onto the davenport, sighing relief. Coat still fastened, she patted her wonderful and ample upper thighs. I did as told, I settled in the vast deep lap of all of her. No mink on earth could’ve given a person more pleasure then, more comfort. Her arms, enminked, closed round me, her hands’ skin felt so cool and smooth. The pressure from a human squeeze released me so, I felt pooled, grown right smack into the front of her.

She smelled of dough. And not just because of interrupted baking. There’d always been this yeasty and producing kind of scent around her. Marigolds, dust, basil. I patted her minks like living pets she’d brung to cheer me. I looked into her eyes’ yellowed whites, the black black centers that’d never let daylight make them less than solid jet. She seemed, if possible, larger than before. Could she be gaining at her age? Castalia had been named, like many Marsden slaves, for a local city. Maybe this added to her sense of scale, child, made her seem both a person and locale, a principality, almost.

“Look at you,” she said. “No wonder they all running from you. Look like
you
the war one, blood all over place. How you cut that hand, on them racks you busted?”

“You know what my husband is begging for, don’t you?
Our
husband. He wants us to kill him, Cassie. He’s like some foaming-at-the-mouth dog that is basically just dying for release. He needs the help that’d only come from being dead.”

She clucked as how Cap had not much more control in this than I did. I should go wash my face and calm some, go take my other children off into one room and tell them what this was about, because some of them—to judge from their faces—didn’t really know and I was scaring them myself. She knew I didn’t mean to, but I was. These strangers milling around Marsden property, it won’t fitting.

I was inches from her jack-o’-lantern face, more of a mask it seemed
as she aged. It grew extra chins in valance rings like her mink accumulated. I felt her list of instructions calm me, narcotic nearbout, it give me simple things to do. We all need, at such ransacking moments, such a person to step in and be specific and to help. What endless aid this woman had been giving me for life. How could I repay it? I think I wanted so much to be with Ned right then, I turned all that banked kindness on the person who’d been truest to me longest.

I heard Louisa playing hostess and I knew it must be aging her. She hated outsiders, shyer even than I was. Nothing was coming at me right just now. I had maverick thoughts like how smells travel in my house—how while cooking cabbage for supper, the kitchen stays surprisingly unstinky but my linen closet, two rooms and a hallway off, seems to suck all odor to itself—household currents I could never figure. Now, my respect for this free slave, my pity for a missing son, my rage against the husband, it all registered as a desire so sudden it hit me in the lower spine, the wallop made my lower carcass dampen instantly the way tears can literally leap out of your eyes at certain news. Leap. I was here in her lap already. Was easy. I kissed her then and saw her eyes accept this as one type of kiss when it started, then eyes widen as the kiss opened to being another sort. Castalia kissed me back, but out of pity? I hoped not. I won’t ever know, I reckon.

A collaboration, okay, but this became such a kiss that it grew like some thought we shared. All I knew was the great massive chifforobe fact of her below—and her mouth’s wit. I wanted to escape into her head forever. At the edges of us two, wrapped in her beautiful if someway tacky mink, I felt a crackling like some circus’s electric air. I heard people standing gabbing on sidewalk clear around our big old house. Thousands of dollars of free merchandise had just been given away by a seemingly crazy woman and maybe other prizes would pour forth and people waited on that.

Again I heard Louisa opening our front door, Lou saying the word “thank” and the word “casserole,” already those were rolling in. How could women
bake
them so fast? Or did ladies keep some constantly on hand for any possible maimings of local kids, specifically Captain Marsden’s? I hated the feel of disorder in my home, I despised the notion of strange adults’ hands calming my twins, or Baby, touching Lou’s thin braids.—Cas now told me it won’t just me, she said as how the Marsdens had done killed Castalia’s mother, suffocated underground, they’d sold her poppa like potatoes. They’d
let
the overseer and his men touch the slave girls, babies practically. “You bend over in a field out there, you skirt ride up? men they come and have they hands on all you, couldn’t do much about it. So this just part of that, seem like. Just the latest. It’s something wrong with how it’s set up, seem like.”

I nodded. I saw that. But, myself, I had other things to do, I was someway unbuttoning Castalia Marsden’s blouse. It was like the peeling of a planet. She must now weigh near three hundred and some, who knew? She looked down at buttons released, surprised, not shocked. “What? What you after,
girl? Ain’t exactly no milk in there at my age.” “The sight,” I said. “The sight. Am I acting like a madwoman here? Because you can tell me.”

She shrugged. “It’ll pass. You just getting used to the idea of him hurt. You gone get by, I reckon. We do. Got to, seem like.”

THEN
I grew real White on her, middle-class, regretful, I commenced to fasten her back up. I heard Louisa rise to the occasion of her brother’s blinding, saying to more food, “For
us?”
Castalia’s hand slapped my hands, their nervous buttoning back. “You think it’d help? ’Cause this’s the one request for anybody’s looking at ’em I’ve had all week …”

I watched mighty hands undo thin cotton. I watched the dark flesh be a V and then a U and then be everything, dark as the mink framing all. I watched hands dip into the strained D cup of a overwashed bra, bleached to being furry nearbout. I watched both hands offer my own eyes these breasts. “So,” I said, not knowing what that meant. “Okay,” I said, and did feel better, seeing her, seeing somebody else. I wanted to hold Ned, or be a child myself. I don’t know what I was doing. Her nipples were salmon color inlaid in this ripe brown field. Her palms held breasts like scooping up great drinks of spring water. Her breasts right here, all used and perfect, badges, burdens, you name it, hers—they were Castalia’s. That was why I’d wanted them.

“Thank you,” said I. “Can’t explain. But it helps considerable.”

“Give us a last kiss and go about you business. Because getting these things back in’ll take a sight longer than whipping ’em out usually does. At my age, seem like everything’s a job.”

We kind of laughed. I kissed her near the mouth but she said, “Give us one real kiss. Nobody been kissing you enough, that’s part the problem,” and we kissed. It held me against somebody living.

ONE SKINNY
white woman stood up from that couch, disgusted with her bloodied wash dress, straightening her apron and feeling a little single pistol was left careless in one pocket there. Miss Priss pinned her hair in place. It was me again, and back.

“Go on out to them, go greet.” Cassie pulled fur over her bosom, modest suddenly and dearer for that. I saw it’d cost her, opening to me. Everything I asked of anybody costs so much. “I will,” I smiled. “I’m fine. I plan to kill him the first chance I get, and now I’m fine.”

WHEN
I looked better I felt better (but that’s the middle class). A washed face, nice bandage on the hand, hair brushed, clean Sunday dress, new apron (with my one remaining pistol transferred from the pocket of that smudged first one). I circulated, shaking hands, meeting eyes. People seemed
relieved. I saw they’d heard things about my being wild earlier. They hugged me like I’d been on a long trip but’d got back home. I told Lou she was off duty. I thanked her. I heard men talking out front and later realized our front porch had become a kind of company store, see, guns they were coming back. Men’d heard Captain was returning, and his buddies, they’d retrieved almost all the weaponry. Thank God I didn’t know this at the time—otherwise, I’d be in jail or the nuthouse now for sure.

I excused myself, held another powwow with my kids in the girls’ dorm. I repeated the phrase “nobody’s fault.” Of course, they’d seen me try and burn his guns, but even so. You had to say “nobody’s fault” to kids this age. I recalled my Archie’s look at me, the un-smile, his accepting question, “Must This Happen?” I tried recalling other things. Nice stuff mostly.

NEWS
had reached us: Cap would be bound home late tonight, come to fetch me. I couldn’t believe he’d leave Ned alone on the child’s first night of blindness. But after everything else, why should
this
small lapse surprise? I wondered, are all men like this or was it just the luck of the draw? I pictured my son with his head bandaged, massive as a small world globe (the neater the bandage, the sadder the picture).

Were there other children in Ned’s ward? Were the mothers there? I hoped. I hoped the nurses were not male ones.

I entered our second-best parlor and talk hushed: one man ended a joke. The other conversation had been about Braille and some outfit in Lumberton that trained good Seeing-Eye dogs. I asked that the name be wrote down and given to Ruth or Lou, please.