Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (129 page)

THE YOUNG
Charlestonian introduced hisself to everybody, twice. He asked for names and hometowns and you saw him memorizing these. Even Willie Marsden, Prothero’s assigned groom, seemed worth the Lieutenant’s notice. Prothero’s voice was smokesome, rich—sleek black like caviar. The new man walked in a rolling particular stride. He used a pince-nez fastened to his vest’s lowest button, held by a two-foot-long grosgrain cord. Prothero circulated behind solid handshakes, acting like some candidate overripe for office. He took time to ask his thin groom about the boy’s hometown and folks. When the Lieutenant found he knew a Charleston cousin of young Private Marsden, he showed the pip a new respect. Prothero remembered all that Willie told him. The Lieutenant loved hearing about Will’s tantrum-prone talcum-white mother. Prothero would wander from his mirrors out where horses were tied. While Willie curried the officer’s Morgan named Target, the Charlestonian asked to hear a certain tale again, again.

Young Willie enjoyed grooming Target—a creature russet, high-strung, and overpretty as Prothero hisself.

Unlike Yankees, who were issued their mounts, Confederate soldiers brought their own animals to war. Plugs, Arabians, swaybacks, mules—you can imagine: any Animal Army gets all kinds, too. I maybe said that.

My late husband considered Prothero’s steed to be the Thomas Jefferson of quadrupeds. Other beasts looked at Target as if into some candlelit mirror that showed them their own raw spots, swaybacks, flyspecks. They bit Target. The officer’s blooded Morgan was out of Upperville’s top-drawer studbook. Target had been overbred for peacetime. During war, what with so much noise and shouting and all, Willie claimed the creature seemed a pinched nerve, five-gaited. Sounds of shelling so scared the beast, it often shook. Instead of whinnying, Will heard the poor thing give off a kind of low humanish cough, “Ah-her,
Ah-her.”
Tied amongst grouchy quarter horses and stinky pack mules, Target seemed some visiting celebrity in its satin-lined plaid. Only when young Will commenced to brush and talk to the poor beast did its trembling ease some. For a few minutes at a stretch, it half forgot the war. But—like with soldiers—never for long, child.

Prothero had inherited a silver sword from his great-granddad. It’d been awarded for bravery by the great Washington hisself. It said so right on its scabbarb and Lieutenant Prothero, if asked, would show you. Others said that, out here, the Society boy’s oily cordial habits sure seemed wasted, kind of sad. “Way I figure,” one private remarked. “He can’t
help
it.”

Nobody liked him.

•   •   •

EVEN
so, the Chaplain felt sure Prothero would become a favorite of the division’s present hostesses. Reverend set about arranging a fittingly formal first meeting with the Widow Randolph and her refined daughter. The Chaplain had retired from teaching classics at Chapel Hill. He was a walking bloodline studbook for the entire South—he had personally met the Lieutenant’s father when Prothero, Sr., was governor of South Carolina.

Unison Randolph and her mother issued officers a invitation to tea on Thursday. Told of this, Prothero smiled and spent extra time at his mirrors. For all his courtesy, something felt unfastened and wide open just under his grins and compliments and bows. Something comical in his confidence charmed you. To muddy soldiers, he identified nearby trees by their full Latin names. When one corporal said, “So what?” the Lieutenant grinned and shrugged. Prothero’s certainty seemed to take its own silliness into consideration and to feel even better for that. His nightly vigils at the looking glass told one and all, “I know that I risk
seeming
ridiculous.” It someway made him less so.

Two days before tea in the ladies Randolph’s west parlor, gossip followed: The Lieutenant had deeply miffed superior officers at his last post. Rumor didn’t yet say how. “Cowardice” seemed likely.

Unison Randolph was not glimpsed the full forty-eight hours before the officers’ tea. Maybe she was being mysterious for the Lieutenant of the mirrors. Maybe she was sewing herself a new black dress. Troops missed her.

Prothero had already heard much about the young heiress. How she reminded every single soldier of some one cherished person left at home. How eager she was to make all the fellows stationed here feel natural. Unison (it was a family name) showed officers no favoritism but circulated among enlisted men, asking after their well-being, remembering the names of their children, their hometowns. She wrote letters for the illiterate (there were many) and the wounded (there were many). She had a talent for cutting silhouettes from black paper. She did “sittings” of men who waited in line for hours, who then mailed likenesses home. Outlines were merciful in how they eliminated splotches, three-day beards, and the crow’s-feet even boys developed from living out of doors for years now. Strange to see a hardened old soldier walking around with a weightless him-shaped piece of paper curling in one hardened hand. “Look, buddies—me, only little!” What gentleness we show our own images! Unison explained to some subjects: The very word “silhouette” had a curious history. It was the name of a stingy French Minister of Finance—a man so tightfisted that newspapers of the day showed him only in black Punch-and-Judy outline. His name became the name of this itself. Monsieur Silhouette. Unison smiled, her scissors creating a nose.

“You don’t say,” soldiers said. “Live and learn,” they said.

She was not beautiful. Her face was too oval and her hair—pulled back—could make the earnest head seem almost egglike outdoors at noon. Her
hands might be beautiful but she was not. Unison Peyton Randolph carried herself with a quality of patriotic mourning that men found moving and familiar. Suffering, which breaks down some people’s bearing, makes others’ even grander, prouder. This is hard to explain, but the dignity of her public-spirited pain made the division see Miss Unison as more a man—less girlish. Made her more womanly—her good sense, the readiness to help, to chance being awkward in the service of a fine idea.—She inspired many sighs.

Unison sat inside the tent containing boys most newly dead. There she sketched portraits of the corpses stretched on cots. Other men looked in. They considered that this made a beautiful and strange picture. They considered Unison one brave girl. They knew that her three older brothers and her father had been killed within one week of Manassas. Had that made a child who looked so frail grow so darn fine and stubborn?—What stirred men more than just the sight of their dead friends? Seeing dead pals solemnly sketched by “a Southern maiden of surpassing sensibility.” That’s how they talked back then, child. Unison mailed many such sad noble drawings to families of the deceased. She sent letters telling of last days, final words. And every man who camped here felt she had special feelings for him alone. When troops arrived, that had been her secret vow and plan. She had succeeded.

Every afternoon, men camped on the lawn and barnyard of this mansion heard Miss Unison practice at a keyboard instrument. Chaplain—who’d led the Seminary Glee Club at university—explained the thing’s distinction. Their hostesses owned one of the three finest harpsichords presently at large in the commonwealth. Dutch-made in the 1600s, it had been barged up the river James to this plantation’s dock.

UNISON’S
fate is of interest. Warriors
expect
to die—or should. Those who survive them learn to live around the hollow that their absence daily makes. But just the way you hear how kids—playing near a brook two dozen years after a war—find this nice metal ball and beat it with a rock to see what-all’s inside and set off an explosion that costs kids hands and eyes—just that way, the punishment of survivors, child—it’s what really interests me the most.

That’s what grabbed me, and boy, I hate it. Even at my age, I still expect a little fairness! That’s the meanest trick of all. How do they keep doing that to us, darling?

Who can teach me to quit expecting?

AS FOR
Prothero in battle, nobody hoped for much. Watching him preen, others guessed that under siege the Charleston heir would prove both bossy and gun-shy—a losing comb. A skirmish happened the one morning before his first meeting the ladies. Northern scouting parties had been spotted down the river James. Prothero and three young officers plus a ragtag crowd of thirty volunteers rode out from the Randolph farm.

Others predicted Prothero would falter or bolt. But on overtaking the enemy along the riverbank, the Lieutenant was seen to jump out front right quick. Pince-nez in place, he led a charge that caught the Blues unawares and sent Vermonters scurrying like allergic girls.

Under fire, the highborn Prothero seemed to grow both chestier and taller. Beckoning and scolding, running, swearing, pointing—the youth appeared fearless—he was exposed during the heaviest of firing. His blue eyes would widen, blond whiskers stiffening like some riled lynx’s. He waved his silver sword around like he was some French warrior posing for a picture. Prothero’s Rebel yell—especially coming from so genteel a officer—terrified even his own men. When the Lieutenant gave off this hellion’s screech, veins big as garden hoses forked across his temples. At the sound you could hear enemy fire cease for about three seconds, like taking a break to swallow onct, hard, then blast again extra loud. In battle, on foot or astride his asthmatic animal going “Ah her,” this smiling Charlestonian seemed to swell toward the perfect target and then press beyond that into some screaming scarecrow puppet exempt from harm.

Well, even the lad’s worst critics had to concede Prothero’s unexpected mettle. The night after battle, he seemed changed. He plainly did not sleep, he did not plan to sleep.

Prothero stayed near his lit mirror. Nobody blamed him now. The evening of his first great showy battle, men watched the nightly ritual with a warier respect. What was Prothero primping
for?
The memory of some sweetheart? The idea of young Miss Randolph in her cliff-top mansion pouring tea tomorrow evening? Civilian life awaiting him in smooth clubby Charleston? Or did he groom for tomorrow’s slaughter of the enemy?

That same night while young Willie cared for and whispered to Prothero’s horse, older men started wandering out towards the animal. They acted eager to pat the officer’s beautiful jumpy Morgan. Will felt proud of the attention Target got. He took part credit. Admiring hands all over the gelding made it really go, “Ah her, Ah
her.”

(Later, the braver Prothero acted on a given day, the more nightly comforting Target got from shy enlisted men.) Still, everybody agreed: Target was a poor name to give your own war-horse.

NOW FOR
a tea party in the Randolphs’ beautiful west parlor! Just four-thirty and the March sun had a strawish pink tone. Head-on light made this mammoth farmhouse seem a palace. The whole hilltop home sat circled by porches like hoopskirts. Porches offered quite some view of the James River’s most dramatic (and strategic) bend.

Men found the mansion’s mirrors yet hung with black crepe. Both hostesses wore dark clothes and four armbands apiece. The parlor’s walls were
nearbout paved with family oil portraits of now-deceased men. The sons had been painted as young boys. They were shown gripping the reins of favorite ponies. In the background—one mild-looking black manservant held his cap and watched riders (the same man from picture to picture, hair going whiter), approving, grinning.

The Chaplain smiled at Prothero. “And may I, sir, present our division’s chiefest ornament, Miss Unison Randolph?”

Prothero noted the girl’s lowered modest eyes. He took the hand she offered, shy, he bowed and kissed it. Other officers smirked, rolling their eyes. But, undiscouraged, Prothero studied only Unison. Her face was a fine and simple oval—maybe too much of one. Her hands, he saw up close, were very good. Black clothes set off her stark half-transparent complexion.

Prothero, stirred by Unison’s severe Virginia charm, soon filled the west parlor with his own perfume. It was a wonderful scent, not manly exactly—but not silly. There was simply way too much of it. He told a story of a riding accident he’d had before the war. He made it funny—he made the faults all his own faults. He made the ladies like him. He praised their home, its view. He talked in a way he never talked to other men, even ones he seemed to like. The aged Chaplain stood smiling in the corner. He gloried in this olden style of conversation—confiding, gentle, light—the type of talk the war had sunk for good. Chaplain sometimes said how this wasn’t the
least
of war’s crimes. War hogs conversation, kills it.

Prothero soon offered Unison Randolph the very highest praise. He jokingly claimed she was almost worthy of Charleston. He grilled both Randolphs, trying to turn up some well-placed South Carolina relation of theirs. Prothero joked that he was sure such fine ladies could not be mere Virginians.

The mistress of the house excused herself at onct. She held a lace hankie to her face. The young daughter smiled at the Lieutenant but her face looked tense, “You mustn’t mind Momma, sir. You meant it civilly, I know, but—in the first place—you do bear a strong resemblance to my eldest brother, Edmund, in the picture there. Secondly, Mother feels that Poppa and my brothers died less for our Confederacy, more for Virginia itself. So, you see, it’s hard on her just now, sir.”

And Unison smiled. Prothero apologized, he bowed. Like the other gents present, he’d found her speech most pretty and most kind.

Unison treated all soldiers the same. That way they all could love her equally—and purely. Around the girl now, Prothero acted agitated and charming but glazed. He had told both the Chaplain and his groom: Back home, he depended so much on the company of women. Unison was the first refined young lady he had addressed for months. Ladies of his circle had always checked and improved his moral progress in the world. By teasing and scolding, they kept him well in line. He seemed to need that, he admitted. To meet another such young woman—after so long—it half alarmed him, he admitted, smiling, stroking his platinum mutton chops.
He was scared that, while learning certain other, ungenteel skills in battle, he’d lost his oldest, surest knack—his luck with ladies. Prothero now explained how he regretted causing Mrs. Randolph grief on his first meeting. Young Unison accepted this and said she must go attend her parent, if you gentlemen will excuse me. The party broke up.