Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (137 page)

I’ll never outlive that walk down our hall, the hall I’ve strode ten million times, I bet. Sunlight was all but faded. Some children were setting off firecrackers on our vacant lot. I reached for his room’s light switch, I heard a grunt, a heaving swing.

The light bulb seemed brighter than ever before. The room smelled of human filth. I saw he’d pulled the bedpan up onto the bed and that he’d smeared mess all over a rug there. But as I stepped nearer, as he kind of smiled at me like some boy child pleased in being caught at manly mischief, I saw what he had done.

Child? He’d got her coat. He’d smeared each inch of it with his own yellow stool. Her coat covered our bed—the bed where we’d conceived our children, the bed that’d sheltered his stored guns—a bed hung yet with his war gear.

“Willie,” I said. “What have you gone and done to us, son?
Explain.”

He crouched over the thing, grinning, some double-daring bulldog in a manger. Seemed if
he
couldn’t have this, her best, our best, everybody’s, then nobody could. He squatted heavy on it, kneeling. His nightshirt was hiked up around his fine-skinned white white hips, and as I moved nearer, my arms out far beside me for needed balance like I was walking some wire above Niagara, I saw that he had got his old male self in hand, he’d got it up and functioning (old habits
do
die hard). And—on his knees in our bed—he’d just shot a lightning bolt of pearly seed across Castalia’s prized, named minks.

The coat was matted, ruined
permanent
. He’d made sure. Even at quarter-speed, he had enough destruction left in him to be real thorough.

He eased back onto haunches. The grin was what just killed me. My first thoughts were of her, how to hide it from her, where I might could find some genius dry cleaners in Raleigh, experts. I would use up all his final money to make this right for Cas. But it was past help, her coat and history. I cannot describe what he had done to it, all over, sug, all over.

I felt adrenaline bloom inside me like a roaring sudden drug. I felt almost elated in some weird way—strong about how he’d so surprised me. He
continually
surprised me just when I thought my outrage was all peaked and spent. Now here he’d come up with another crime to add across our son’s eyes, to pile over my own peeled loving life.

“So,” I said. “You been planning this? or’d it just sneak up on you?—
No,”
I said then. “You’ve gotten everything but this she grew from scratch for her own self. And this, you see, we needed, Willie. You can’t have this.”

He smiled like some man at a party who’s just said the tip-toppest wisecrack and is unbeatable and clever and knows it all. Nothing of my own was left worth vandalizing, but hers?

“It’s useless now,” I said, praying she’d keep eating. “It’s useless to anybody now but, on principle, I think I’ll be wanting that back. Give me it.”

I touched one corner. He pulled the thing away like believing this was just a game. I tugged and saw that he meant business. And I knew I did. He leaned against our headboard, breathing, mighty against the decoration of Ned’s bugle and the twig and his own scabbard.

The room stunk of him. Or maybe us. Our years all come to this. Seemed like when I’d left my kitchen just now I had been a girl and here, seeing this, I was fifty-five going on ten thousand. Old as vintage dust, older. Old as colors.

“There are limits and you’re way over now.
No.”
I grappled for the hem. On knees, he lifted a sleeve of it to dangle, like some bullfighter, luring. I caught the hem of her mink. Just seeing his huge corded hands there galled me—sacrilege. We were waling each other within ten seconds. I was half on the bed, trying to yank the fouled rug out from under him, and I was managing, despite his greater weight. He saw I was winning so he got me by the voice box again. I lost all air, all, honey. This time he meant it. His hands, around my throat, felt ceramic.

Soon onct more: them little stamp-sized silky fabric swatches, just floating betwixt my face and his eyes wiry with bloodshot. I wanted to scream for help but dreaded Cassie’s coming, seeing her masterpiece, then I tried screaming anyhow. He choked me whilst muttering, “They killed …
They
…” I flailed around, my arms extended to their furtherest. Hand open, I touched the cool brass upright of our bedstead, knocked aside the twig, and found a cool cool scabbard. My air seemed a thing of the past but I had enough sensation left so I still felt how cold the metal was. I welcomed that.

The rest is history—which means: You would’ve done it, too
.

I worked the scabbard off our headboard. I was down to final oxygen. Likeways, I was under him. I let that whole arm straighten free of him bent over me … out to its full length, my own arm came back sideways at him and with last energy—with all my life really really meaning it, with purest glee and rank conviction and a joy just shy of, oh, exceptional sex—honey, I’m bringing that scabbard’s heavy handgrip up hard hard against the ribs and then toward collarbone and finally up against the head of
it
. Of him. Trying and send him back to It where It belongs.

I kept chopping, blind I was, a steady chipping sound. And yellow was the only sight I saw. I heard a noise out in the hall and tried shouting to her, “No! Don’t look,” but he still had such a vise around my vocal cords, child. I heard just metal meeting bone, nice sound. I did that more, a kind of spasm dance betwixt us, hooking us like in the old days, but for different final reasons. “His temple,” go for his temple, and in adrenaline’s wild cascading calm (always my friend, Adren, and a pal ofttimes called upon) I had time to realize that Temple was a church and holy place, plus the pivot trigger of a brittle head. Here’s the church and here’s the steeple, open the door and free all the people.

There came two noises, one a long shriek from behind me that I knew was not from the sight of me being strangled—not from the sight of me bludgeoning the man back, a sight by now grown almost humdrum—no, it was her, understanding that her coat was dead. The sound rolled endless as some great tire screeching flat, as a great ship’s sinking.

For the coat’s sake, I kept at it. I got a pinch of air, and finally after one serious break and splinter, wind rushed into me with such a sissing welcome sound, like, gasp, my flying up, inhale, to freedom finally.

“I’ll live.”

A skull is a fairly tough old egg but can be broken.

He was bowing across a fur coat smeared in liquids yellow and white and now smudged with added red. Half his face and head were black-red, messy. I regretted that. But I was busier screening her coat from her, me crying, “Don’t look at what we’ve done to it. Go out, go wait. I’ll fix it.” The blood
I’d
helped to add. I wadded fur behind me, I pressed it there, hiding it, and blubbering.

“Embarrassed”—I literally felt that, shielding her garment as I squatted over Captain Marsden’s sideways carcass.

Cassie stood there in the doorway, hands joined, fingers laced before her, wagging the head side to side and looking completely and totally detached from me and from him under me.

She said two words, very quiet. She said, “White people.”

I REMEMBER
it was Election Day. I’d volunteered as a poll watcher and was due in two hours’ time and felt guilty about missing that. Cas and me stayed like this the longest time. The unfailing Seth Thomas chimed in my
clean kitchen and I longed to be there with it, out of this, all this. How had this occurred like this? Ugly.

She stood in the door looking at my husband and myself and doing nothing. Nothing left to do.

She said, “Wants it all, they take nearbout everything good, these goddam whites.”

I clamped hands over my ears. I’d rather look at him than hear this out of
her
. Despite the mangling of the head’s one side, there was just a bit of pink across his white beard—not bad, like damage you spit out when you’ve brushed your teeth too hard. He appeared, child, unbelievably relieved. Cataracts filmy. Calm for the first time in decades, or maybe ever, maybe since that day he left our beloved town holding hands with his buddy like girlfriends that age might.

Finally I said something pitiful and male and
really
white: said I’d special-order a sable for her, would she like a sable? After I’d tried that crude type of bribery, she come over and dully helped me get down off the bed. “Well …” she said, resigned, exhausted. “Well, so it like this, is it?” and she looked him over. She spoke. “Oh, Willie Willie Willie, look at you.”

She lifted the chenille spread and I feared she’d toss it over him before I was even sure of his state, though I basically was sure already. Instead, Cas eased the cloth over her coat. She yanked mink free of his weight via many unsentimental shoves. She carried her mink like a burn victim, child, to one corner closet and in there, bending to the floor, Cas hid the thing.

Next she dragged back over and pressed one ear to his chest. “He gone,” she said.
“You
ain’t got nothing to worry bout,” she said, like
she
sure had. “Be self-defense.”

“Self what?”

I’D SAID
I would relieve Lolly at the firehouse polls by six and I got there just in time. Naturally I cleaned myself up first. Cassie wouldn’t talk to me. I sent her home in a cab. Silent. No winter coat of mine would fit her. The sheriff and the undertaker had finally left. I’d phoned them all, cool as anything, and told each what’d happened. My tone of voice was samish, boring—I just laid out how I’d killed my own spouse, around three-ten, in there.

At the cinder-block firehouse, wearing a scarf and a clean jersey dress and after bathing my late husband’s shit and cum off me, I settled there greeting people, smiling some, Lucy Regular. Nobody really knew yet and I was enjoying this part because I understood it couldn’t last. Had to end. I got there around six and had thirty-five minutes’ grace before one of the Lucas children came in and gaped at me—not able to hide her shock—and said, “Lucy? Should you
be
here like this, after … this afternoon? Are you all right?” I said nothing. Other ladies at the table cut their eyes my way. Lolly did, she’d stayed to chat. The Lucas girl, Jean, sweet person, Jean, she
says, “May I? I know this is chancy, but may I?” I shrugged. She pulled my nice silk neck scarf aside. The others gasped at the four-inch blood blister, clear around. I hadn’t let myself even look at it in a mirror. At my age, you can bathe and brush your hair away from mirrors. Maintenance.

“I am going to ask to walk you home, Lucy, may I? I think we should, really, or stop by the new doctor’s on the way. May I do that, please? Let me walk you over to Summit, sweetie, now.”

“I don’t want to be there in that house tonight, Jean. The polls don’t close till nine. I believe I’ll work straight through if that’s okay.”

SHERIFF
told me there would be an inquest.

I told him in glum flat detail how I had beat my husband’s head in with his sword holder and how I was really ready to take my medicine. I’d known Sheriff Cooper since childhood. His granddad and dad were both Sheriff Coopers before him. He pointed to my neck and
he
pulled my collar open (Jean had snitched!) and Sheriff said, “Looks like you’ve already taken some your medicine. No, ma’am—Mr. Marsden’s death will likely be reported as on account of ‘a fall at home.’ If I have anything to do with it, and as elected county sheriff, I do, ma’am.”

“Maybe a
serious
fall at home,” I said.

“Okay then, serious. He did have what doctors call a violent streak. Them that lives by the sword … Ma’am, I’m out of line here but some of us never got over the thing with the gun and Ned. Ned was my age at Lower Normal, my class.—In all my years of police work, I’ve never come near to throwing up until today. The sight of it sickened me.”

“I know.” I looked down at my own hands that’d done it. “I’m so ashamed. I used his scabbard on him. I told you, Mr. Cooper. I don’t know if I
had
to hit him that number of times to slow him down.”

“No, not him. That, I seen before. Not him, the coat, ma’am—what he did to her coat she grew. She’s been wearing that since I was knee-high to nothing. That was the worst. Excuse my professional opinion at this time of mourning and all, Mrs. Lucy, but? Ma’am? he was one sick motherfucker.”

“Was he? I guess so, sir, but … you know. Right along, he was also sort of … you know. It’s day to day, ain’t it? You just take it day to day.”

DIED
on me finally. I had to.

I DIDN’T
clean his room up, couldn’t face it yet. Felt surprised when the undertaker cleared out Captain on a khaki stretcher but not it, not her coat. It was still in our closet there under chenille, like personally ashamed.

Sleep, I didn’t expect. But I slid right down into the famous rabbit hole.
Major final thought: I’d get a new one for her, genuine sable. I would phone Mr. Ekstein—use my first and only in-jail phone call, if it came to that. I’d order sable floor-length. His store’s motto: “If you don’t know furs, know your furrier.” True, Cas wouldn’t have no access to the names and dispositions of each li’l beast in it. But I did at least have sense enough not to go and buy her a new
mink
one.

Next day downtown, Ekstein said he could, for a price, get the sable here by Friday and the funeral. It’d come clear from Raleigh in a truck with just that in it. I ordered it against the Captain’s life insurance and savings, and though it cost a pretty penny, I loved news of its expense. It
had
to cost a lot to even start to mean something. It could never mean enough.

I hand-delivered it, but all I’ll say is, I knew it was a pale imitation of the real ruined one. (I’d taken the original to the back door of Ekstein’s in a big shopping bag and, with him stone-faced at the smell, showed it to him, asked, “Is there a chance of … cleaning it up?” He finally held his nose and shook his head and said that this coat had cost him more fur business in Falls for more years than I could even imagine. A homemade fur coat scared people off from getting a real one.)