Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (7 page)

Odd, the kitchen sometimes felt more crowded
before
my cast of characters woke and scuffed downstairs. Somebody would soon admit to unfinished math homework, another might show first polka dots of chicken pox (“Momma, I don’t
feel
so good”). But not yet, thank God. A crew of quieter, healthier ghosts rose with me, my list and honor roll trailing after, faint but real as steam. The water’d long ago been ready for coffee. I let it babble anyhow—just the way I let children natter about anything they pleased, me half listening to their staticky half-music. A jay bossed sparrows at our feeder. Later, Moxie, the Seeing Eye Labrador, would be underfoot—another mouth to stuff.

I was often tired. That I know. Looking back, you don’t want to misremember and soften one little thing. That’d be wrong—I’d rather sound too harsh. And yet, I admit, at times and from this distance, misrecalling sure is tempting, child. Especially about our house before my others rose. The wall under the clock was penciled with their heights (changing each six months) but their initials constant. From this narrow bed-wide cell here, these partitions of yellow plywood, I recall my own home kitchen as being so huge—half a train depot and full of eastern light and, with water boiling, chummy-sounding as a fishbowl-sized reunion.

Once the twenty-odd pieces of breakfast toast were under way, once all lunch boxes and thermoses were lined up and latched shut, once each was tagged (Baby’s full of complexion food, Louisa’s with that extra sandwich she begged for despite her little weight problem), once the sun—following Lucy’s good example—got the idea and trudged toward its monitor’s position overhead,
then
I would allow myself a first cup of coffee. Dear God but it was excellent! Having done a bit of work already always made my java taste the better, child. At fifteen, I learned to take it black. That way you’re freer. Freer of expecting extras. I had just one cup for starters but savored so before rushing upstairs on my unpopular mission of waking.

Throughout, I left the saucepan boiling away downstairs, on guard, chitter-chatter, giving itself away to kitchen air. Sometimes I’d refill the pan. I told myself such steam would be good for all our lungs … But too, I just liked the sound it made bubbling, a heart-to-heart with morning light, itself, me.

At this Home, staff people heat things up. We got no microwave at
Lanes’ End Rest owing to six patients’ pacemakers. So even now, even in this world of rockets and all, water takes just as long to boil. Some things never change, which is good. Personally, I want to be cremated. Studying water’s boiling taught me how clean it’d all be. Fire will just have a conversation about you and with you, a real
thorough
conversation, I admit. You’ll meet fire. Fire will take a shine to you. You’re its subject. What will it say about you before it loses interest? I know how, in a quiet morning house, water makes party sounds, the angels of the elements all up and gossiping at dawn. Another-day-in-the-world’s shoptalk.

If authorities let us have hot plates here in our cubicles, I swear I’d do me some water every morning of my life—just to smell and hear and feel it play across my face.

Child, I sure miss boiling my daily own. You know what water is?

Water’s family.

MAYBE
I told you how our charity Home got its peculiar name. All this property was once owned by a merchant family, name of Lane. Our leafy dead end of the road kept being called the Lanes’ End of it. And when this cinder-block, glass-brick, and asphalt-roofed thingum got built on the cheap in 19 and 49, the name stuck. Lanes’ End.—Nobody can tell me it’s a friendly title for a body’s final dwelling place. I don’t like to talk against the officials but I think it’s sloppy of them not to be a bit more sensitive and to change it. Might as well call it: Funeral Home Annex. Senility Central. Or something.

Reading the wooden sign’s
WELCOME TO LANES’ END
when your ambulance pulls up, well, it’s harder on the new people. By now us veterans make jokes about it. You learn to. Maybe that’s
why
we been around so long. That, and the love of our daytime TV show,
My Children, Right or Wrong
, plus little hallway scandals, and a basic knack for laughing things off. The old ones that can’t, ofttimes they go first.

He who laughs—lasts.

RECENT-ARRIVED
women tend to mix in quickest. Though sore from travel, they wonder, What
does
one wear to dinner? A sign of health. New-here men take so much to heart. They care too much for their old idea of dignity—the dignity of a thirty-five-year-old boy, not somebody eighty-odd or over.

Darling, you got to keep revising downwards how much to expect. Or—no—just shifting what you’ll settle for. I don’t want to scare you about getting up to this particular thin-aired timberline of time. But let’s put it this way: You got to be willing to change. Once
you
harden, the arteries do.

SEEN
in downtown Falls, young Private Marsden was public now—pared of his mane, freed from passenger vermin (he almost missed them like they’d been his last war victims—and ones he might’ve saved, pets kept pearly in a jar). The boy dressed in civvies that at first felt uneasy as a robber’s disguise. But Willie soon looked regular in street clothes as you or me. He buggied across three counties reclaiming family holdings. He knew—if you plan to make decent money—you got to at least
look
in charge.

Bound for his livestock yard, the boy passed other vets gathered in a pie-shaped park before our pretty Courthouse. Some got helped downtown by wives—these ladies were overjoyed to have their whole mornings quiet at home.

Two bachelors lived life in matching wicker hampers. Friends lugged these legless one-armed fellows towards the sunny public spot, left them out—to air all day like laundry.—Passing, the stringy young Marsden forever touched his big hat’s brim and politely sidestepped this motley crew. Sure, he heard them jawing over old campaigns. He chose not to stop—seemed he had nothing much to add. Before the war, Will had considered these men cranks and yahoos. They seemed even more so afterwards. Only now—they felt the world owed them a living because they’d lost major battles in three states!

They did get strange respect downtown. Small girls sat there, listening big-eyed, keeping clear of awful brown tobacco juice that vets spit with infantryman’s prideful aim. “Didn’t get any
on
you, did I, peaches and cream? Will you look at this curly head, fellows? I tell you
that’s
what we fought it for.” Ladies placed dinner leavings and mended shirts on park benches nearby—like small offerings set near some religious type of shrine. Child, now War was done, these roustabouts finally had all the leverage some people ever ask of the world: at long last, subject matter.

So did Marsden but he kept his trap shut.

The two in laundry hampers rested beside each other sunny side up all day at Falls’ dead center, soaking in whatever tales got told, both fleshy within oval baskets—like two huge willing nasty ears. Most of the vets had known young Ned. They’d heard about his mother’s convulsions on hearing the news. They knew how Winona Smythe had—for the first time in years—ventured off her own property. She’d stormed downtown and right into the First Baptist’s sanctuary during choir practice. She grabbed her donated art-glass pitcher and candlesticks from off the altar, all while screaming toward the steep-pitched roof, “I want him back, now. Or
else!”
This was the way our delicate choirmaster first learnt of young Ned’s death. Winona won’t exactly Mrs. Tact on tiptoes. The entire alto section had to help the poor director home. (In emergencies, you just couldn’t count on the temperamental
sopranos. Altos’ll usually come through for you. I speak as one myself before time made my tunes go so colandered and crackledy.) Altos carried him up the steps to his one room as he taunted them, “That Smythe boy had more talent in his little finger than all you thirty years of dullard monotones combined. The voice at large in him. To lose his perfect pitch
and
the war! I loved him. Are you ladies shocked? Do be, please. Because, where does any of it
get
you, the keeping quiet? Where does it? Thirty years’ painstaking musicianship. For what, for whom? Who notices, what use?” The altos considered crying but didn’t, instead they cleared their throats, in perfect B natural, a tribute to him.

Altos found his room lined with three decades’ pictures of the choir—Ned’s curly head was real recent and proved much circled here and there in red. Two at a time, for days, altos sat beside the bachelor’s bed, they feared he’d take his life. Near the bed, sudden casseroles cooled and hardened. Altos sat with him in pairs because he was, after all, a man alone and wearing pajamas (marked with cleft signs). These were churchgoing women, after all—even if they knew this bald lost gent was not exactly a major menace to unchaperoned womankind. Women were his best friends. That was it. Women stayed the ones he blamed and yet the ones he cried to.

Under their breaths, while the choirmaster slept, altos muttered: poor Winona was now cooking on a campfire in her yard, was sleeping—during summer storms and all—in a pup tent in her side yard. Somebody saw her patrolling her yard’s edges at night, lifting before her a canary cage she seemed to mistake for a lantern, seeking the one just man.

COURTHOUSE SQUARE’S
gimpy vets had spied Will Marsden walking blocks out of his way to avoid Winona Smythe’s house. He’d been back nearly a month but still dreaded that first visit. And who could blame him? Willie spent his Saturdays visiting spots where Ned and him had played. Far out past the ice plant, clear beyond Silver Lake, young Marsden was seen to wander. His new black boots were muddy from patrolling ditches where two boys’d onct trapped crawfish. Some of the old “camps” had been reclaimed by fresh batches of kids—the way birds’ll take over abandoned nests. Marsden seemingly approved. On the ground beside a tall sycamore, he left six dimes for the six black kids presently playing there. It was Nash County’s steepest sycamore and famous for that (in Nash County). From its topmost seasick limbs, you could spy clear to the poorhouse, high over and beyond the river Tar, almost to the forty steepled churches of Rocky Mount. Ned had got fired on while swinging from a sycamore. All this mattered to the mumbling young Marsden now squatting in a ditch nearby. His gold watch, still on loan from the Northern dead, rested open before him. His big dark hat rested on a forked stick jammed into the mud. Willie stared as black kids tilted the whole treetop side to side—he wore a strange stricken look. Seemed he expected the sycamore and all its children to explode in about thirty seconds. He checked his watch. Something strange
was going on with Willie Marsden, a bottling-up that’d pop out soon or later. Count on it—law of physics. And with Falls being the size it was, if somebody noticed him yonder alone in a ditch, this meant—in under two hours—most every single local soul had heard.

People worried about him, true. (There are certain men that get noticed because they expect too little from the world. You want to tell the fellow, “Hey, you’re entitled. You especially.” This lack of hoping attracts others. Seems Mr. Gloom is full of liquid secrets, banked inside him. Oh, to wheedle a few loose, it’d be like siphoning pure gold honey from a ugly dusty hive. Nurses, ministers, romantics, children—and fools—
will
move toward these ones. Watch.)

BASED
on what I’ve seen here in Lanes’ End Rest, I could write me a whole new Surgeon General’s Warning for Your Health, like maybe: When you lose your looks, don’t repeat
don’t
expect to get treated as a beauty no more. Makes sense but you’d be surprised how strong a habit Habit is. (The physical beauty part is one thing the Lord never handed me and therefore never got to giggle whilst snatching back.) I try and warn former beauties, Find something else to get you through. Get
good
at something. Even if that means crafts—wood-burning yet another Sitting Bull’s head onto yet another pine plaque that’d rather stay plain pine.

We have a rougher time trying to make our new-here men feel properly noticed. Notice is a kind of oxygen. The professor across the hall told me about a experiment done at some Mexican orphanage: won’t no nurse allowed to touch the babies except whilst changing diapers or jamming bottles into their mouths—and you know, from want of notice, some of them children just died? Fact. Happens at this end of the production line too. It’s hardest on your shyest widowers and bachelors.

Arriving alone, they keep to their rooms. Men have got this gift for prideful glumness, for rehashing long-done-with grudges. Dignity—the wrong kind—undoes many a gent, seems like. They arrive here and find four woman to each male—you think
that’d
give them the will to live! But no—regular happiness seems cheap to them. They don’t trust it yet (and with some fellows creeping beyond ninety). Once and for all, darling, getting old ain’t getting wise. I could give you a wheelchair tour from room to room and prove my point. No names, please.

First thing men notice is how our Home’s roof leaks so bad. Come April showers, there’s tin and plastic trash cans lined up for catching hallway water. Your chair wheels get soaked. Your hands go black with rubbery grit. Then men discover that the food here can, some Thursdays especially, nearbout gag a maggot. To gents, it starts seeming a plot against them personally.

Being fellows that had jobs and pension plans they’ve outlived, men hate knowing that they’re on the dole. All their lives they’ve said how Folks that don’t Work should Starve. Now they can’t work but they ain’t ready for what they been wishing on the shiftless of all races. It’s especially hard on
your registered Republicans. They think us others in here, poor as them, hold it
against
them, or else that we ain’t fit company ourselves, also being this broke while this “mature.”

After the new men have been socked in here two weeks, we know if they are going to get the joke or not.—The un-laughers? the what-did-I-do-to-deserve-this types? well, they just die out quicker. It’s simple. But if you see a fellow take a little interest in
My Children, Right or Wrong
, if you catch him asking what happened to each character before he come in on the middle, and if he speaks to you at dinner in Multi-Purpose and makes it to breakfast a few days a week, if you learn what he done for a living and which part of it he was best at and what he misses most, well—maybe he’s going to be with us for a while. He’s in on the prank, see? and knows it ain’t just a stunt at his expense. It’s here for
him
to chuckle over too.