Read Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All Online
Authors: Allan Gurganus
Tags: #General Fiction
She didn’t crawl toward her house but went lunging among underbrush, holding the letter stretched between either tiny hand, using elbows and knees to inchworm her weight along. Beloved birds indoors, hearing such cries, went nearbout crazy. Canaries had remained Winona’s best and only friends. Her body stayed low to the ground—like some soldier’s when air’s plaited through with lead.
Neighbors heard, walked, come rushing. Among them my own mother—who was not that yet—a thin strict half-spoilt heiress whose mission in life was to later whip me into ladyship and grammar and who failed at both, poor thing. Folks found courage, finally pushed open a creaking gate, they lifted Mrs. Smythe from out the chest-high weeds of her un-lawn. They helped the lady up porch steps into her house. Nobody had ever been invited in. The grocery delivery boy claimed it was the worst-kept white household in town, no cleaning done, ever. Widow Smythe’s staples were mostly oatmeal and pralines, plus birdseed purchased by the tow sack.
Entering, folks hushed from the shock (“Not our polite little Ned”). Folks silently remembered small neighborhood decencies of his. Bound for school, how clean Ned looked. True, he placed live pigeons in the schoolhouse desk drawer of “Witch” Beale. But when they flew at her, she laughed!
Visitors soon grew quieter from the pure strangeness of being in here. Overdue library books were stacked in columns clear to the ceiling. You wandered across scattered birdseed husks, in some spots inches deep. “Like sand on the beach,” said Momma every time she retold this later, “thick as sand on the beach.” The front parlor was paved with old newspapers, spongy layers that your shoes sunk into. This whole home seemed the whispery bottom of a single birdcage.
Some neighbor girls strolled right into Ned’s room. They’d always wanted to. Nobody thought of keeping them out. Girls knew just where he’d slept. Hadn’t they seen his lamp in here while he did homework for “Witch” Beale? Girls found the little cell real tidy, a few wooden toys, some pictures (a grizzly bear, a deer) cut from magazines and tacked up just so. One child touched the small oak bed’s white blanket, found a single golden hair, she held it to daylight. Other girls gathered to touch it. “That’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen,” one said, and, sniffling, girls retreated with their prize.
Adults had propped up Mrs. Smythe—glassy-eyed—on a black horsehair chaise that proved she must let her thirty German-but-filthy birds fly free right often. Neighbors—waving the postman’s smelling salts under Winona’s big chin—were promising casseroles. During hurricanes and house fires, minutes after hatchet murders, the ladies of Falls had and have one ready answer for survivors: a nice hot casserole. It still works, darling, and I’m glad for it, having eaten many a one since I got too old for anybody’s letting me near a gas stove. (They tried calling me a public menace for cooking my own breakfast—alone at home, imagine!)
Neighbors were already forming shifts to come check on Mrs. Smythe. Somebody noticed her breath steady a bit, her nostrils spread. She suddenly
bellowed, “You
made
him leave. My one child. I should’ve kept him back. You know what he looked like? How he sounded? You led the brass band to my front gate. You’ll lose your war anyway. Watch. I just understood—I’ll never see him again, will I? Tell me otherwise. I’ll never get to wash his hair again.—Who asked you in here? Vultures, with their young. You swoop in the one time I’m too pained to stop you. Buzzards! Leeches and their leech babies!”
The group back-stepped quick over years of
Falls Herald Travelers
. Winona lurched, folks spilled down her brick steps. The committee of girls ran fast but guarded that one hair like it was some single lighted birthday candle. Everybody poured through the garden gate, feeling safer on the street. But Winona didn’t leave her home. You could see her in there releasing all birds from their cages. She slammed her front door. Through porch-glass panes, neighbors saw a black dress now flocked across with beating yellow wings—the fragilest cloak and helmet of real lives. “Make my skin crawl,” somebody said. Somebody else said, “She’d be a novel, but nobody’d believe it.”
Won’t two full days after the widow drove sympathizers from her yard, she posted a sign announcing that her songbirds were now for sale. (She’d been broke but hadn’t admitted it till knowing her poor Ned was dead.) And it was that very evening, her watchful neighbors—ever vigilant for casserole reasons or new chapters in the not yet written Book of Here—noticed the addition.
Come morning there it sat in Winona Smythe’s brambled side yard: a gray army tent propped—occupied.
I STILL
own the letter. Winona willed it to my Captain. I got it next. Chain of command. Its writer was the gent who wondered aloud, would a war be “canary suitable,” who stopped Rebs’ carving up the Yankee sniper. See my bedside table’s top drawer? Sometimes I call it The Archives. Sometimes I call it the top drawer. Fish out that whole musty bundle. You wouldn’t believe what-all’s in there. I’m sure I’d be surprised by half this mess. Look, time’s turned my papers and me as brown as any good Cuba cigar. Here …
August 19, ’62
Dear Mrs. Theodore Smythe,
We sorely regret to inform you that during the early PM of August 12, 18 and 62, your son, Private Ned Smythe, much beloved by his fellows-in-arms, was, in the line of duty, while being elevated to the rank of National Hero, deprived of his young life. The fatal skirmish took place roughly nine miles southeast of Cheatham, Virginia. The commandant (who was some distance from the locale
of said incident) has asked me to explain that, at the time of your boy’s death, young Ned had scaled a tree, apparently scouting enemy fortification on the far shore. It was then that Yankee miniés found and ended his valiant young life. He was killed at once, and, insofar as it is possible to tell such things, without apparent pain.
Though custom dictates that such letters as this inform the bereaved family of how respected and beloved their deceased soldier was, in Ned’s case, the task proves especially easy (and therefore, Mrs. Smythe, most difficult). His beauty of character, of carriage, and of person were remarked upon by all. His trusting genial air and constitutional fineness provided each of us, during fatiguing manoeuvres, with an odd margin of quietude and consolation. His singing voice alone was a gift enjoyed by some of the Confederacy’s highest-ranking officers. The night before he was taken from us, he sang for the men and with a perfect trusting composure that bespoke an admirable and genteel education.
He leaves behind a friend from your hometown, a boy as yet (these seven days after the shooting) only fitfully able to continue. If you will permit me a personal note in what should perhaps remain a more official communication.
Not long after one of our early victories, we had reason to encamp at a former mining camp along the Shenandoah Ridge. It had once been devoted to the excavation of either mica or gold. Its building showed the effects of years-previous abandonment. Pleased by this bivouac, both your son and his friend adopted, as boys will, a particular deserted cabin. They made it theirs during the four days we used the site.
The hut had been formerly employed, to judge from scales and a remaining chalkboard on its wall, as an ore-weighing station. Late one evening, as I was unable to sleep, I found myself pacing and smoking, feeling singularly homesick. I chose to wander our camp. I carried a lamp and, as I passed this roofless cabin, my light chanced to fall upon some bright surfaces within. I stepped through an open doorway. One full burlap sack, patterned with a felicitous checkerboard design, rested upon the table between your son and his friend. Both boys had fallen asleep while playing marathon checkers. The “pieces” were shards of crystal which the boys had collected at our various camps, much to the consternation of our fond commanding officer who warned as how the weight of such souvenirs might well slow the lads when they most needed speed.
On the aforementioned chalkboard, boys had marked up their scores. One youth’s side was called, according to the legend, “The Official Falls, NC, Checker Team,” and below it, a second such association had been titled, “The Other Official Falls, NC, Checker Team.” I am myself the father of two daughters not far from the
ages of the children I encountered that night. I stood in the hut looking down upon these boys intent on passing time while seeking to somehow encourage themselves. The sack holding their game had become a mutual pillow. Only boys’ crooked arms prevented their young faces from pressing onto the quartz bits arranged between them. The children’s muskets were propped, at the ready, in a far corner. Boys’ fitful sleep would, I feared, stand them in poor stead for tomorrow’s long march. And yet, stepping forward, about to wake them, I hesitated. Something in their slumber, their very trustfulness bespoke a similar moment I had experienced in my daughters’ treehouse, one built with my own hands. I did not wake your son and his friend. I could not bear, Madam, to remind them of their current whereabouts and circumstance.
As with all of us here, the boys lately witnessed instances of carnage which—had we been forewarned in the quiet days before Sumter—would have seemed literally unendurable. And yet, one survives! I found the small moment I’ve described to be so peaceful and consoling. I felt nearly guilty at the peace I let it give me. But I have forgotten myself and my official function here. It is very late. Other chores are before me. I was writing of your son, a young gamesman making the best of an inhuman situation. Of course, it forever stays human because, human, we are here, having to endure it. I must end.
The camp is now so quiet, the countryside so peaceful. Even the twelve cannons I see across the way are all beaded with dew. It is inconceivable what noise and bloodshed might break upon us with first light. In addressing this to you, Madam, I seem to communicate with my own family and with all those persons I have written during these past two years. I have set down, usually at less length, roughly nine hundred such letters. I feel myself becoming half-accomplished at it. There are many things we should all remain quite bad at.
It is grievous to consider that my years of education, my early attempts at diary-keeping and at clarity of expression—enterprises so blithely and romantically undertaken in my privileged youth—should be thus enlisted. I recall my boyish Odes to various seasons, to various young ladies of my acquaintance. Odes! Were I now to try one, its subject might be the miracle that any person should have found the time and hope to ever attempt such a thing as an Ode!
Before first light, I must write three more families of three more men and boys I knew. If time proved less limited, I might send a second note of condolence to the mother of Private Marsden, so much a pair were those fine examples of Southern Boyhood. Please convey my sentiments. Her father, the late Judge More, was, I believe,
in my father’s class at Harvard College. They often traveled to school and home on the same holiday trains.
Closing, I can only leave you with reminders of the undoubted Rightness of our Cause. Be comforted, Madam, in understanding that your Child, while admittedly losing his life and being “untimely ripped”—has also Risen to the Threshold of that August Assemblage—The Martyrs to the Great Cause of Secession.
I remain most respectfully yours, a brother in grief, a fellow parent, an aspirant to glorious Honor and/or the Aforementioned Martyrdom Itself.
Officially and personally, Madam, I sign myself, with utmost sympathy,
First Lt. Vreeland Hester, CSA.
3:40 AM. In the White Oak Swamp, somewhere Southeast of Gaines’ Mill, Virginia
I MISS
boiling my own water.
I been in here fourteen years and, previous to that, a stove was mostly where you’d find me, something to complain about slaving over a hot one of all day.
My husband liked his beef done nearbout raw—the children hated that. Seeing Captain’s so pink, they always chanted, “Nosebleed, nosebleed.” Where do kids come up with these things?
You
ever try doing a twelve-pound beef roast in your wood stove so meat’s one end’ll turn out red and the other a nice dark brown? Well, try. Mostly it’s in how you stack your firewood.
But the water, the comfort of each morning’s water boiling.—Back then, I’d be the first one awake naturally. The kids were babies, and me I won’t much older. Dawn seemed my sloppy younger sister. Many’s the day I beat her downstairs. Right off, I’d stoke kindling in my Wedgwood stove. From the pump, I’d fill one favorite white enamel saucepan rimmed with red. I always placed it on a back burner. (Otherwise little paws grab handles and scald little heads.) To be up and puttering in a big still-sleeping house, to hear the paper boy lob today’s
Falls Herald Traveler
more or less onto our front porch, to hear his bike click off, followed by the toenails of his dog on Summit Avenue’s bricks. To find that nighttime dark had gone a wet-wool gray as soon as you quit expecting light. From the window over my sink, our back yard looked to be a dresser drawer full of mist.
I was never one to use a kettle. (Teapot whistles make me nervous.) No, I liked to
see
my water boil. Pearl bubbles gather around its edges (a family reunion, resemblances galore). Then they send family representatives up top to check. Finally you have the whole thing twirling into necessary violence.
I like to
smell
my water, feel its steam uncurl. At this early hour, water offered Lucy her best company. Times, water felt too perfect to be local—it seemed international or better. A spirit friend. I’d be making production-line school sandwiches. Lay down your two dozen bread slices in a row, get you a goodly glob of butter—then run along the table—coating every last one, target practice. I could do it while half asleep right now and from my wheelchair here.
My morning mood I gauged by water’s speed in boiling. If it happened quick, I felt more “up.” If it took forever, was going to be one of
them
days.