Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (29 page)

I might have resented my husband telling me about his frustrated “honeymoon” at age thirteen with a girl then about my own honeymooning age. But I didn’t. I liked him better for admitting it. Made me feel more grown. Made him seem a sight more worthy.

I think that sleeping with my husband had unlocked some tenderness I was not yet ready to award to him alone. So here I was running around looking for someplace to give it, like you give old clothes to the Salvation Army while bragging there’s nothing Wrong with them except you’re being bored of them.

Wasted, I was, wasted.

I STOPPED
by Lucas’ and stole something. Had no idea why. The first small thing I could slip into my handbag, it slipped into my handbag. In the alley beside the store, hid behind packing crates and the chopped purple paper fruit came in by train—I checked to see what I’d grabbed. Sardines in oil. I used the can’s key, uncoiled the thing and, with my bare hands, fed myself one whole fish at a time—how delicious they were, greasy with amber oil, salty. I craved salt then. I’d been feeling queasy around ten each morning. I stood here slurping down the ill-gotten food. My face must be a slippery mess. I bent forward so as not to get none on my dress front. I wiped hands on boards of Lucas’ store siding. I kicked the can under shipping litter and stalked home the back way, sure I must look varnished from that delicious tacky lunch, sure I must look guilty for theft and my confused mission to Baby Africa.

I had told her I’d stay out, gone some place to play. Home early, I’d now wash up a bit, stay busy, silent.

She won’t in the kitchen. Bread baked and the whole house smelled yeasty, possible. How bright the day had grown and how relieved I was to find her out somewhere, probably bullying shopkeepers who always treated her like explosives experts brought a sparking black round bomb seen in the funnies constantly.

Going upstairs, feeling shaky, I unpinned my braids, dropped my handbag on the bed and opened the washing-up room door.

Castalia wheeled on me, whole and entire—stripped to the waist, her blouse tucked into skirt’s elastic. She was covered with water and soap and high gloss and it was hard to “read” where her arms stopped and neck ended and her breasts began. Prisms confused things further by throwing great tints and rainbow wens across the springy bulk of her. On the counter, violet and lilac soaps I’d saved from the hotel, these laid out like sample candies, most scrubbed down to nothing. How do I describe the great mahogany body, its curves and weights and browning counterweights—all this in a white-tile room to set it off more. For a second I couldn’t tell what was what, which a breast, where. Everything seemed locked in spongy rings like soft targets or a Saturn ringed with human breasty flesh. Nipples gave me bearings
—they were violent pink and big as drawer pulls or shot glasses, overturned. Ribs beneath looked muscled as a man’s from years of work.

All this I’ve taken time to describe was mine in a flash and we could both hear the downstairs Seth Thomas go one o’clock. Then I closed the door on her, her mouth left open, I closed the door, taking care I shouldn’t slam it, not wanting her to feel she’d been nabbed or judged. The bathroom had been sloppy with tossed water, prism reflections doubled in standing wet. I leaned back against the very door of a room with her in it. I had no breath. There’d been so much of her, seemed my wind all flew out through my eyes trying to embrace or describe. Honey, I might of been some shocked boy. You’d think I’d never laid eyes on a lady’s form before, much less
been
one. But in some ways I hadn’t. Seen it. Not like that, the real thing.

Our house was so quiet. I could hear her in yonder—recovered—back to ladling the soap off her. I leaned here listening to so light a sound as water dripping off those great smooth shapes.

If, before I headed down to Baby Africa this morning, somebody had said, “Excuse me, Mrs. Lucy, but we’re doing a personal survey. See, we have it from a real good source that in something like three hours you’ll walk into a room and see your archenemy Castalia without no shirt on and what do you think you’re going to
do
, seeing that?” Well, I’d of answered, oh, maybe, “Faint,” or “Scream,” or “Upchuck!”

I’d of been wrong. I now breathed funny, felt winded like the morning was a preparation. The beautiful four inches that showed in her face was just Coming Attractions for this bulk hid lavish under colorful wraps.

I told myself it was only the surprise element that’d got me.

I now dashed downstairs, pinning hair back up, trying to give her room for drying off, regaining dignity.

I settled at the kitchen table, feeling lonely and shy, face still greasy as a cat caught eating fish. Agitated. Hearing her slow creak down the steps, how old her footfalls sounded, and yet how full of promise her mammoth younger body seemed. I placed my hands on the table. I dreaded ever seeing her again, especially with clothes all on. I dreaded speech. I wanted to tell her every little thing that’d befell me since I left the house.

My each breath skimmed just a dime’s worth from every dollar’s lungful. I pressed knees together. She hurried to her stove like that was her home plate and safe, the redbirds clean and cheap and perfect and secret with a meaning that was hers only.

Then, leaning back against black cast iron—hands braced on its cool top—she turned on me. The front of her orange blouse was wet and this made me sick—no, not sick, but something. I
wanted
to breathe. I just couldn’t remember—between breaths—how.

Seemed I had to talk. I would tell her how I’d gone downhill and seen her handsome oldest sons, I’d praise their looks, yeah, what momma could resist that?

“I … went and saw your big boys.”

“That
what you calls them?” she said, and laughed.

Oh Lord. It was something, the size of her laugh, big as a working two-man saw. It came out of her whole—everything she’d been saving back. As mean as she had acted, that’d been just the back side of this part ringing towards me now, like all Falls’ church bells. When I saw the fun of this, how she didn’t even mind my blundering in on her, that she won’t the least bit ashamed of using keepsake soap or bathing during workhours, I said, “Your big boys, yeah, a good one.” I laughed. I felt weak then weaker, hands over my face, sucking air, but grateful.

After seeing her, after eating them sardines, after cackling so, I slipped upstairs, faint but grateful. How strange I’d felt of late, a kind of secret fizzing in my lower body. I now slept, but woke at dusk to see a man’s shape looming over me. I snatched up the covers, half-hid. “Sources tell me you were strolling all over Niggertown in a great mess of barking dogs, presumably down there looking for her home, am I correct in this?”

I told him I’d been curious. “Curiosity,” he bent and whispered at my neck in a way I didn’t like, “curiosity killed the cat and also the pussy. What have you two been doing behind my back here all day? You think I can’t smell something when I come home from work?” I told him I had no idea what he meant. I told him walking Falls’ streets was my right. I told him I had nothing else to do. He said I would, very soon. He planned to purge the house of her. He said I
represented
him. No wife of his was going to be nipped at by hounds down there. I would be occupied with cleaning now, with cooking now. I explained that, true, she interested me, but nothing else. I dreaded saying that I’d caught her lathered, that the spread of her had stirred and scared me—and sickened me a little—but had scared and stirred me too. Darling? I didn’t yet know him good enough to level with him yet. I hadn’t told him about missing two periods. I’d asked nobody what that meant. I wondered would I die and where the leaving blood stayed put, and I suspected, don’t laugh at me, child, cancer. Being fifteen, my first thought, as he strode downstairs and fired my valuable ally in this big barn (that’s what she now seemed), my thought ran: I will die of cancer and, boy,
he’ll
be sorry.

I stole halfway down the broad staircase and listened as he told this woman he’d known since birth, he’d owned since birth and then lost then hired, “I’ll write you an excellent letter of reference.” “How long a one?” she asked, and made me wonder. He didn’t answer and I guessed she was having him on someway. “You sacking me for what I didn’t do,” she said. “Three-quarters pay till I find something better or even not. Them’s my terms, slughead. Don’t and you looking at Miss Mouth.”

He said that sounded fair. What did she have over him? He asked if she needed help moving her stuff, and Castalia told him to send for her boys and to lend them one of Cap’s rental wagons and a mule. “When you wanting me out you house, sir?” “Now would be nice. You and her, it’s a very bad
mix. No hard feelings. Nobody’s fault.” “No?” she said, and the great clatter of cookware started and our back door slammed and the fruitwood Seth Thomas chimed 7 p.m. and I moved down the steps and towards her.

I was a brave little girl. She had supper simmering deep in the closed slots of the black stove and I come and stood there in the open doorway.

“I heard,” I said. Castalia was alone in the kitchen.

I was very tired but I braced anyway, expecting physical assault. I stood here, almost wanting it. She started to unload her private closet. I knew every item in there and I guessed how, tomorrow morning, the sight of that space empty would make me feel way lonelier than now even. It seemed like she hadn’t heard me but—light-headed—I grabbed a kitchen chair and pulled it away from the table. I didn’t want to look like some employer waiting to be fed. The lamp needed lighting. I dared not move. I heard neighbors talking over the back-yard fences two yards down and laughing. It was the cicadas’ one-in-seven-year appearance and they were making their insane, building noises all over town. There was enough ruddy light left to show me a packing maid, and when she glanced over here, all her fury at me was missing. I’d ceased mattering. Punishing and testing me now seemed part of her former job description maybe. For one second I wondered if the Captain put her up to it, some torture meant to form me faster as a tough little adult. She wrapped her mink-raising handbook in a clean striped rag and tucked it in a cardboard box and I saw she’d packed most everything except the clear bottle with the liquid and the skull-and-bone warning.

“What’ll you
do?”
I asked. She shook her head, made a sound like some steam iron snorting to life. “Sit.” “Sounds nice.” “You oughts to know.” But all the edge was missing from that tone I’d got to know so good.

I considered saying, “Will you show me how to make a omelette?” but thought better of it. Instead I heard a girl ask one departing older woman, seasoned enough to be the girl’s great-grandma, “What does it mean when the person misses two sets of monthlies and the sight of food makes her want to turn kind of inside out? And, Cassie, it’s like this big horse pill is dissolving down in here, like kind of burning or bubbling. What
does
that mean?”

I saw her turn. I saw her arms cross and then unfold so either wrist now rested, fond, on either hip. She shook her head sideways once, so hard she swayed whilst saying, “White people!”

And before she grabbed (I knew she would) the bottle full of toxic gin-clear liquid, before she guzzled that, a huge woman—just a bulgesome silhouette in this room full of early evening—she stepped before my chair and told me (without once lifting hands off hips to demonstrate the ins and outs) all about what went where and what swam towards a what and how long it took to ripen into humanhood and what a fetus two months old would have and not have on it and roughly when I could expect it, and what humans felt like, coming out of humans.

How still things got then, even the cicadas tapered down a bit. First
words I said after learning all that in a few solemn phrases and knowing my delivery date, said, “And you won’t be here.” Then I hid my face behind my hands. I couldn’t help it. She had more on her mind than silly me, but oh this house would seem a jail without her in it with me.

When palms parted, I saw her back at the closet, heard clicks and grunts and saw her upper body heave back and a glint and she was drinking that whole bottle down and I was now a leopard in the air. I was not on feet but leaping from the sitting position to the falling and I’d got her massy ankles and I pulled her down as the bottle shattered against a far enameled wall. The sound of her full weight coming down against and beside me (but not
on
me, proper, Lord be praised) was weirdly gentle—plop drub thump thump—like rain, or water boiling.

“Whoof, girl,” she said. “You done spoilt my brew.”

“No, poison, spit it out. We’re not worth that.”

She told me it was moonshine brewed out on The Lilacs from stolen corn, by slaves around 1860. She’d been saving it, disguised, the way maids will, as cleaning fluid. Now I’d spilled it. Had I gone through her things? Must’ve, if I’d seen the markings. “Yes, ma’am,” I said. I finally told her not to forget her crucifixion amongst the staples high on yonder counter.

I kept waiting for the old anger. I expected to be blamed for the firing and the spillage and for knowing way too little. Instead, her voice was lighter and less crabbed, far younger than I’d ever heard it. I asked her, bold—having gotten big answers already tonight—what the redbird meant and who this Reba was and would I ever meet her and might she, Castalia, ever come for supper once I learned to cook some? “Fat chance,” she laughed, cynical but merry.

Maybe fumes from spilt corn liquor made us drunk a bit, the room reeked as she answered me, told me odds and ends, my first corners of the story of how a girl from Africa with great expectations
feels
waking up as body servant to the likes of my hubby and his persnickety intelligent momma. My bone side was slatted against her dough-sponge side. I some way smelled of mineral oil and day-old underclothes and a touch of vanilla extract. She smelled of moonshine and of asters.

There’s a seam where the bitter and the lovely join, and her voice, her scent, her size all seemed tonight right there. And she was just beginning to explain—off duty—I should’ve
seen
the expression on my own face when my hairbrush lost its bristles, she was just conceding that—as a torturee and house slave—I hadn’t been
completely
without some kind of aptitude, when we heard this stirring in the hall, a muttering that locked us both and caused us to half-cling to one another among broken glass and puddled corn brew, when here came a lit lantern, held by the house owner, him followed by two gloomy young black men.