Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (62 page)

(Bless you, Miss Witch, our silk purse stuffed with the big bills of History and Taste. You knew everything but how to save yourself from the folks you most hoped to save. Lord rest your martyred heart.)

THERE
, pretty much done. Except for a final question. And I am asking it, darling, of me and you and of flint-hearted History itself.

What
is
black, white, and lilac?

If this here query had been put to me at age eleven, I would’ve bragged, “Why, that’s the modern history theme I just wrote for Miss Witch Beale and that she liked right much. The one that Poppa helped me age the new brass hinges of.”

At twenty, I’d have said, “A school paper done by a very innocent little girl very, very long ago. That, plus maybe some new multi-tone boudoir-decorating trend mentioned in a recent number of
McClure’s?”
At fifty, “Three names of three popular shades and whatever on earth happens to be those particular tints. Period.”

I think, at seventy, I had enough on my mind so I’d probably forgot ever doing the twenty-six pager I’ve tried breathing new life into here. Asked the question then, I might have said, “What is this? three colors? a joke? Maybe one about some nun hooked on red wine or something? Tell me it.”

At age ninety, I ain’t too sure if I’d have recalled Mr. Goethe’s naming colors “the deeds and sufferings of light.” I do now. At the end, so much comes back to you, and clear as day.

With me creeping nigh onto a hundred (imagine), I’ve grown more cautious about blabbing any off-the-top-of-my-head ragtag answer.

Look, by now, I know what I know.

By this time, honey, so do you.

Miss Beale, the best thing I found out: How much they’ll tell you if you trust enough to ask. True, my paper don’t exactly mount up to no national document. Still—ma’am? it’s what I learnt.

Today, if some pushy eleven-year-old shoved to my bed’s edge, if she offered me the old question, child, I believe I’d try a shorter truer comeback.

Q
: What is black and white and lilac?

A
: Depends.

C
APTAIN
wanted to name our oldest boy Ned. I didn’t think it was too good of a idea, seeing what’d happened to Ned the First. More babies followed—knit one, purl one, turn around, you got a afghan—family spread across your knees and spilling down, warming the very ankles that’re swollen so on their account.

Those days, it was either one end of your use or the other. Like being a broom that’s strawed at both ends, north and south, you circle yourself to keep cleaning up after him, even after lamps go out.—Those days, I can’t tell you, you that’s always had the vote, that got to go to college and can smoke anywhere so easy it never even dawns on you to start, which is good. You, who can discourage babies in advance of seeing what they’ll look like and then falling in love with their first smile instead of saving your own self! Well, comparing then to now, it’s night and day. I’m ready to start over.

WE GOT
us a Ford car, was the first in all of Falls. Model T, black of course. Oh, spluttering to church especially, we were mighty stuck-up for about four weeks. Till we got outshined by Doc Collier’s Pierce-Arrow. Then near-strangers would say right to our faces, “Yours is just a Ford.” Jealous. Still, it was good for me—overnight I’d grown snooty as Lady More Marsden in her prime. Went out and bought me the goggles, a driving hat and veil, gloves. Some days I wore them around the house, as a joke for the children. Cleaning in those. I was just a girl myself. Captain drove that thing as if
he’d done it all his life. Children begged for the privilege of washing the Ford. I caught Louisa, a enterprising darling, charging neighbor kids admission to scrub our auto—big kids, too, boys! I felt proud of her. “How much you clear?” I called her aside. She acted ashamed, “Not enough for nursing school.”

“That what you salting it aside for?”

Lou nods.

“We’ll get you in, Miss P. T. Barnum.” She held out a nickel, offering to rent my goggles, hat, and gear. I give them to her absolutely free.

One noon, Cap drove home with this look on his face, fingers kept carving maps all through his brown beard, he paced, counting platinum watch-chain links like the Pope doing beads for dear life. Kept talking about a pilgrimage. Revisiting the war. By then we had eight of the children. Yes, child, eight. Happened just that fast. Many of my wee ones were in their diaper years. Sure made traveling harder. Won’t like now, where you just throw them paper things away. Oh my no—had to wash each one, had to keep the evidence on hand, you had to love your children then, just to stand it.

Auto was a hand-crank Model T. Not like these station wagons you see these days, ones with added playrooms for your babies to go be busy in. Children were either on the floorboard or in your lap, period. I’ll skip the arguments I gave for not traveling. It come out, he’d bought the autocar just so’s he could go. Here was the twentieth century’s big breakthrough and what’d he want to do with it? drive back to war in the nineteenth!

We set out one Thursday just at dawn. I had told him he should go alone. He said, “Lucy mine, fact is, I’m frightened to.” That got me, naturally. I packed enough picnic stuff to feed a regiment. By then, we were one.

Leaving, our town looked sourish but pink with waking. My baby in my arms, I stared out at all the unfamous things I knew best: the school, the church, a tree where me and my best girlfriend’d built a tree house and practiced our first kissing on each other, the courthouse monument to Our Fallen. I sat worrying we were bound for something that we shouldn’t see. “Say ‘Bye,’” I told those children awake in back.

“Bye, everything,” Lou said, waving at the Courthouse Square’s highest-shooting water fountain, the green bench before Lucas’.

Took us nearbout three weeks all up into Virginia and Maryland to find his basic war spots. Cap had left two trusty black men in charge of the stockyard. By now, they mostly ran it anyways. They scolded the Captain, growing more frank the more work they did for him—at the selfsame pay. Fellows explained he was crazy to buy the first local autocar. Here they were, trying and sell Marsden horses, Marsden mules—and he went tooling around the counties in this show-off backfiring boat unhitched from any
animal at all. He shrugged, he told them flat, “I wanted one.” It’s all the reason a boss ever needs.

We bumped into a few other vets, men nosing around old acreage, men fingering fence posts for bullets still wedged there, men pushing their wives’ and children’s fingers into brick walls and tree bark so’s they’d feel the lead there. Treated kin like Doubting Thomases that didn’t believe it’d all happened, that
wouldn’t
believe till their hands got poked wrist-deep into the sticky maw of it.

I heard one wife say, “I am not jamming my finger into one more thing, Stan. I know it was rough.” Us wives, sisters, mothers followed our men. Some vets were on crutches, some got lugged on stretchers by hired black men. But all vets were looking overly alive. Us wives give each other tired grins. We rolled our eyes, overeager for peace, quiet, and a good couch. Counter-pain. The children thought this open land was just a playground. But, for vets, it sure was not, and you had to keep your babies quiet and in rows. It was hard.

And you think the Captain would let me tend our brood in the autocar whilst he stepped off battle events, maps held nestled up near his brown beard? Not bloody likely, child. We had to follow every last stride. So the babies would remember, he said. Was like pacing off a hunt for buried treasure, only without the treasure. The second-saddest thing to fighting a war is remembering it inch by inch decades later. I told my husband that a child has got to be seven or a mighty smart six before such fine print stays recollected. Our babies couldn’t recall their home address much less which Reb regiment under General Thus-and-so tried holding on to which Reb ditch.

Captain did name our oldest boy Ned. I let him, had to. “You pick the girls’ names,” he said. Well, Ned was old enough to notice the trip. He was bright, eight, all eyes under sweet humid blond ringlets. His curls would tighten up and ease, our own live-in barometer. “Come here,” I’d call. “Let’s see, oh yeah, says: Clearing by late afternoon. I thank you, messenger boy.” “No trouble,” said he, running off to organize those younger. His curls were noticeable, like ones in the picture of Ned number one I’d found during our honeymoon. No girl or woman could resist wrapping her pinkie finger inside a bouncy little ringlet and asking, “How does he
do
it?”—like he stayed awake nights. Lolly, my beautician, avoided Ned. Forced to see Ned’s curls, she went glum. “I do excellent work—but sometimes I lose heart. God sure is the hair burner to beat!”

Such flattery never really spoiled our oldest boy but, too, his big eyes did register each compliment. Took after his poppa in that way—and, come to think of it, his momma, too. A great gatherer, our Ned. If there was more than two of something, loose, free of charge, and small enough to pocket, why he’d collect them. His corner of the boys’ upstairs bedroom looked like a magpie’s own ideal museum. And now, during Captain’s pilgrimage, Ned
had already snagged stones from each battleground, plus leaves and—whenever possible—bird feathers he found.

There was something about Ned. For one thing, he seemed as smart as I
remembered
being. Which was, truth be told, and allowing for mistakes of recollection, pretty crack-outfit bright. On balloon tires as we rattled through Virginia—me holding our newest baby—I sat recalling how one morning when Ned had been nearbout a year old, his eyes were just starting to like the middle distance. His eyes’d finally settled into their true color.

I was bending over his cradle. It’d been the Captain’s. Castalia and other slaves had hid it with The Lilacs’ choicer furniture when Sherman’s torches swarmed through Falls. I was just tucking blankets around my baby’s feet. I felt something strange, like a sudden lift in temperature or some dip in the wind outside. I, quick, looked up to his face. It was framed by the cradle’s dark hood. Studying me, they were, the eyes. Eyes made up most of his face. Hair was all white-blond and eyes were shiny, bounded by pale lashes. Ned’s eyes shone broad and gray, speckled as birds’ eggs with these flecks of amber set way in, lids hardly blinked. For the first time, eyes really saw me as one person, whole, as me. They fixed right on my skin, bored in, moved from my ear down my neck to breast to breast and back again. A dog barked two blocks off. I felt I should be learning something from this. Ned’s eyes seemed about to ask for help. Thinking he was hungry or that a diaper pin was sticking—I bent closer.

And I had pulled right down over his rosy face when I felt something catch in me, this kind of hiccup got me just under the rib cage. You see, I’d recognized the eyeballs. I pitched back, then drew nearer, saw how his eyes were less asking for my help than offering some of their own—giving off a kind of baby-animal curiosity, guessing, “And what
do you
need, sister?”

I had to lean against his cradle, counting on its rockers for support. Because see, darling, here they were. The same. The eyes—old and young all mixed in them, those eyes I’d first seen peeking (civilian) from the Captain’s fort of a face. Now my boy batted his lashes, showing this 20/20 sweetness. He proved to me: My faith had been rewarded. I’d helped to free them. It was my small part in Emancipation. Just when I thought I would never reach the boy I’d first spied hid so deep in the smug reviewing-stand officer, just when my own tiredness made each dawn feel like a huge new horizontal subtraction mark, I looked down at my child’s blue blankets, I saw he’d torn that whole set of eyesight free from trouble.

Saved! Here were eyes aloose again and full of peace, a fresh start in the open air. “It worked,” I spoke to his cradle. I stood there, one exhausted girl, half laughing. He watched—a mild careful expression. His hands kept moving in round baby spasms like planning to someday somehow clap. Ned’s eyes seemed smart enough, they
trusted
so. Our house was real quiet just then. Mantel clock ticking in the front room. Oh, I felt like everything was possible at last. I felt honored to be at home with a gaze this safe and
sure. “I did it,” I told his face in his father’s cradle. “I did it.” No shame, I wanted full credit. Ned couldn’t talk yet but he could see. Me. Among others.

SO
, at age eight, here he fidgeted in the car’s back, watching farmland sweep by, plenty old enough to love such a trip. Ned’s rock/leaf/feather collection was under his father’s front seat and it looked more and more like the nest of some scruffy mammal half beaver, half bird. (And I knew he’d catalogued each scrap of it.)

Riding along his dad’s war path, little Ned stood, leaning on the back of Captain’s driver’s seat, arms crossed, head bobbing level with his seated daddy’s, listening hard, Ned’s yellow-brown curls bright against the first grayed touches in Captain’s temple. Times, gazing forward, they looked like two heads of the same thing.

We would see a low stone wall, Cap would pull the motorcar over, would sit there parked, hands fisted on the steering wheel, motor still going, his forehead warping. In back, our other babies—all but Ned and Lou, our oldests—kept picking at each other, squabbling like all children on car trips will: “Did so, did not, did too, unh-uh, bet you anything I own, you don’t own one dry bean, do too, do not.”

Ned, tilted forward, hair full of predicted weather, waiting for whatever news his dad would choose to spill. Lou wet the tip of her pencil, ready to jot into the travel diary I’d bought her. Good calfskin—it locked. I made sure of that. Lou’s broad hands held her precious book, she was a large-framed girl, built like her poppa (but with the fine skin of
his
momma, plus such a memory for figures).