Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (134 page)

Among the troops, nobody ever spoke of what’d happened way out here. They never mentioned Unison again. She’d lost their respect. She was dead to them.

This I’ve told is just a little incident of war.

It won’t show up in any of your more official histories, child.

I heard it from W. More Marsden, Falls, North Carolina, born in 18 and 49—my late husband—Will, the groom for Target, the horse of young Lieutenant Prothero from Charleston.

This happened March through May of 1863.

Poor men, poor boys. Understand, two more whole years of it were waiting for them up ahead.

RECORDS
show us: Unison never married. Until 19 and 41, she was teaching piano to the children of the prominent in Richmond (Virginia).

—
YESTERDAY
, on a home outing, Taw and me rode the blue Chevy bus. Among others we sat, not hand in hand but at least pressed wheel-to-wheelchair. Bus stopped alongside a shiny hearse. In back, one tapered mahogany box. Taw looked down at it. He snorted for all to hear, “That’s what I need. A nice, dry, lined coffin.” Many laughed. At our age, the laugh of recognizing. We’d all thought that.

Still, it got me down a bit. I went back to quilt planning. It’s comforting, nights specially. I know what fabrics I would choose but guess Jerome can’t find them. Still, just telling makes them so.

Requested cloths so far?: a nosegay of dotted Swiss from Shirley’s pinafore so yellow it’d cause a citrus-grower to pucker. One pair of long Johns, cashmere—red/white/blue, knitted by a mother for her iceberg-bound soldier boy. A white snippet from Lady More Marsden’s stay-at-home silk wrapper charred the faintest ivory. Maybe one of Little Xerxes’ tuxedo tails—white satin fine as Lady’s silk or better, and as a tribute to her. Baby’s plaid organdy hairbow. The piping off one aunt-stitched honeymoon travel-outfit,
seriously stained. One pink cotton blanket I wrapped naked Archie in and ran for help. A stiff plug from Maimie Beech’s starched uniform that broke like cardboard when she sat first time each day. Poppa’s blue serge postal outfit, worn but rarely. My granddad Angus McCloud’s hunting-plaid kilt. My own momma’s narrow batiste slip, hacked by garden shears whilst chopping off curls and wasps. One small square of gauze from my Ned’s eyes that day on the Men’s Ward. A swatch dyed with Momma’s people get-rich indigo. Maybe dingy lovely Belgian lace from a sad lady in transit on club cars. Gray worsted off the tunic of a child soldier that so unhappily outgrew it. Jerome’s best gold-lamé disco “top.” And surely samples from a homebred, home-fed, home-killed, hand-tanned real mink coat. Plus green velveteen off a costume shared by Bible Judith and my regretted Louisa. And stuff it with the down from Reba’s holy red birds.—That’ll do for
one
side, child.

What a counterpain to sleep under or die in. We all got to represent each other. Every color is a deed and suffering, a prize. Our quilt’ll be, oh, quite the winding cloth and glad rag.

—Pull it over me!

I
’
D ALWAYS
been married to a old man but now I was onto oldening up myself. If I’d started aging, he seemed ancient as some minor pyramid and about that easy to pocket. For years now, he’d been mild, lost, furious, lost. He spent most days in one of his nightshirts. Slave-made things, they’d outlasted slavery and most that sewed them. Beautiful with monograms—frayed at cuffs and collar but irreplaceable, being 100 percent mortal cotton. You can’t beat the stuff.

His presence in the back bedroom became a demand every minute. I counted my distance from the brass bed (even whilst out shopping at Lucas’ Superette—big-time, Luke’d got). Cap kept usual relics hanging on our bedstead—the bugle, its blood-red cord faded all but purple now, the twig off a sycamore where something bad happened, the handsome heavy scabbard. If my man stayed quiet too long down that first-floor hall, I worried. Like with my children—ours—only silence meant you needed to go check, and quick.

Castalia helped. Over she’d come, bottom-heavier and slower-moving, with a countable number of silver hairs like watch mainsprings curling at each temple. In all seasons, she honored the homegrown masterpiece of mink, long about ankle length it struck her by now. Seemed more a crenellated fort she peeked over the top of. Only up close did you see how many tiny pelts had gone to make it, poor conscripts signed into some glue of a army.

She spoke less but, when she did, talked more about Back Then. You heard her make things up about a Africa now sprung almost wholly from her head. People I knew she’d known in Falls would turn up in some tale of long-lost tribal uncles. Did I stop her? You kidding?
Me
, child? I poured
more coffee the color of her coat and her. I tried not to listen for my massy male baby down yonder hall, a genius at interrupting good parts.

Cas’s skin had lately lost some of its sheen. One of our pet beauty aids was olive oil and—while she talked—we’d rub some steady into our chapped knees and elbows. Though it helped considerable, it left us smelling like two portions of one salad.

At corners of Castalia’s generous mouth—the starter culture that’d taught my husband to kiss, and his daddy, and had even kissed my mother-in-law and had, I well remembered, seriously kissed me—excavations showed new sinkholes of wrinkles. Under eyes, new folds were working crisscross, tic-tac-toe-ing. Ashamed, I thought of a elephant’s skin seen onct at the county fair. Her clothes tamed down to browner, golder tones—the hot pinks and yellows lost or given up. She was quieter around town and people got even more scared of her. Merchants now gave her merchandise at cost, and called it tithing. She’d sometimes laugh and you could still see maybe half a inch of the first beauty near her eyes, but here, too: a puzzle of boxy lines made the slightest mirth feel a little bitter. Even when she looked at me, I felt some edge—like “Is this shrimp all I can find to call best friend?” If I
was
that. Sure wouldn’t have minded hearing Cassie call me it. Never really did.

Her weight grew, the arms rarely lifted from her sides. Couldn’t, probably. She acted nicer to fewer and fewer loved ones (the list had never been long) but she behaved more neutral to old enemies.

Sometimes she’d shed her coat in our house (a honor), she’d kick her shoes off and pad down the hall and bellow at our patient, “Look, what ails you, High and Mighty? The fight gone out you carcass finally, you menace to womankind. Know who I am? Well say it then.”

I waited, clearing the table. She shrieked, “Luce? He say ‘Cassius’ … I believe he
do
know.”

Like me, she wanted him to
be
here. All here. We would rather take our chances with his wild side. We liked that better than this other drool and fade. That seemed a judgment on us both. Her and me won’t ready. Men lapse faster. We get some catch-up ball at the end—a little justice.

OF COURSE
, I still knew folks around town. The checkout girls at Safeway sometimes called me by name. I didn’t have no idea who they were till they asked how one of my far-flung kids was doing. Louisa now headed her whole hospital’s nursing schedule assignments up in Newport News. She wrote regrets that her skills won’t more help to me here with her cranky pop. Ned taught boys at the Travis Methodist Home for the Blind, Plymouth, N.C. Only saw him on holidays. He’d come home by train, him with his cane and one leather satchel, the dark glasses, and a head balding early—under his mad-professor hair I’d see that perfect smile, the same. He was often the last off, helped by conductors who treated him like more a guest of honor than he ever made of hisself. Ned might bring home his latest prize
pupil, some boy who’d lost his sight and his folks in one car wreck—and who was glad to be someplace real for Christmas. I always felt glad and nervous, having Ned home. Like he was a celebrity. We got many letters about how good he taught, how selfless and all. I would sit at my kitchen table (same one, naturally—“if it could talk”) and just read praise of him and feel so proud and yet I’d wonder what he might’ve done … Well, but, the truth is—this sounds bad, I’m sure—but times, thinking back, I can’t rightly remember him unblind. That’s how long it’s been. That’s how good he took to it. Times, I recalled how he once used his eyes as cover while he thought back in there mulling somewheres—eyesight a wall to hide in the shadow of. Here lately, too, the two names Ned have merged till it almost seems that our blind beautiful Ned’s father was not Captain but the first Ned, who’d someway managed to have a son
through
Marsden, so we got one Smythe instead. Let that pass. Confusions. You’ll hear more of them from me in time, I fear. Others here forget what hour our dinner’s served. My failure I’ll call overremembering. It gets a jumble sale and crazy quilt of this beside that, identical, but eighty years apart and never met. As I listened to our blind son chatter bright over some new listening machine at school, one bought with money he helped butter up the local rich to win—I found I was forgiving Captain Marsden more and more. For that, at least for that part. Seems we each have got some set shape to our lives. You can change degrees in that bend, but you never get to challenge the whole basic shape beneath it. Other times, the opposite seems true, so let that pass. What do I know?

Our twins were business partners of the rarest kind—them what trust each other through and through. They’d
married
twins (and the wedding was a little rich in symmetry and gingham darlingness for my blood, but I didn’t say nothing critical at the time). They were together in the real estate game, as they call it, pistols them two. Coming up, they’d never been my whiz kids but now riches were raining down on them like another part of the plan. Didn’t matter they’d been held back a grade. They had money, were my only children not in nursing or teaching or some service to others. Except Baby, of course. But I reckon acting is a service. She had a walk-on part as a French maid in
Her Second Marriage
and walked off with the reviews. She sent us copies by the fastest possible mail. One said: “How many things can be done with an ostrich-feather duster? Consult ‘Baby’ Marsden, currently seen as Fifi, the scene stealer in our latest parlor drama at the Roxy. Other cast members must loathe ‘Baby’ precisely as much as last night’s audience was thoroughly hers.” In the margin, Baby’d put a exclamation point beside a question mark. Wanting Mamma’s approval, not sure the review was rave enough?

Things moved and changed and I knew I’d been through most of what’d have to happen next. Experience has a way of working for me in threes. It now seemed more than two-thirds shot.

One day at the Superette, I spied this September sale on new school
notebooks, a bright stack, and though my children were off being grown or beyond, I bought just one. Red. I opened it at my kitchen table. I planned to get something down at last. I’ve forever loved a fresh chance. My kids had told me a couple times I should write down what’d happened in my elastic lifetime bandaging century to century, a tree graft. “Nobody’d believe it,” Louisa smiled. I wished she’d lose some of that weight, she still had such a pretty face.—Well, I drank three extra cups of my vice, coffee (nobody’s perfect) and wrote: “In the town of Falls (N.C.) a plain little girl was born …” I crossed that out. Awful, bland as anybody. So then I jotted: “Me, I started out young …” Too sassy by half. I wadded up the page. There seemed too much to tell while I was setting here alone. I needed a crowd, or one questioner’s “Yes?” Needed to
talk
it out. My single major knack. And so I took the almost virgin notebook to my husband’s room (I’d just got it “broke in” good). He looked at me, suspicious, pleased. I put a pencil into one big tawny fist of him, the book I opened in his other. “Get busy, Mr. Man. Write your memoirs. You’ve loved all them other war ones. Mark Twain wrote Grant’s and they made a fortune, pulled them both from debt. So, start. Get us out of hock.”

He tilted his head my way, more the way puppies do or parrots in movies. Trying to understand, cute but by accident.

“Memoirs means memories, nothing fancier. Write your memories in here. List them. I’ll be back at four and I want to find a goodly start, boy, hear me?”

When I stepped in later, he was sloppily asleep. But I saw marks on page one, and oh, my heart did a little skedaddle snare-drum roll. Odd, after all this time to grow excited at the thought of your old man’s life being wrote up (or down). His years might finally achieve a start, and mid, and end. That’d help it
mean
something to both him and me. He had made a drawing looked like this:

I stood in the late-day side room (you’ll be relieved to hear we didn’t share a bed no more). I studied this sketching of his major war loss. Marsden’s memory was in there yet, in some Miami of the nervous system, fled as far south as The Confederate Scared can get. I looked over at the moony-bearded face, one now watching me. Eyes suddenly open—still that gray and wildly young-looking.