Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (79 page)

Still, Shirl’s dresses were never exactly plain. Her hefty mother nursed ambitions for the one child. The Mrs. forever added cheap trims, brass lockets, net panels onto poor Shirl’s sleeves, hems, collars. Shirl was forced to wear straw hats in warm seasons, furry felt ones fall and winter. Her smocks stuttered with frills. Tired cloth roses drooped everywheres. Talk about colorful, her frocks tended towards your raw mint greens, overly pinks. Shirl had one outfit made of bitter yellow that could made a citrus grower pucker. Local folks pitied a child forced to walk around like some dime store’s notions counter. Fingering the latest fringe, some asked, “Aren’t you
hot?”
But Shirl, pure dignity, never onct complained. When Shirley Williams visited us, Momma often eased into my room’s open doorway, mother’s mouth set, hands clasped before her like some solo soprano waiting for her cue. She’d come to check on Shirl’s latest getup. I knew and it burned me. Shirl smiled her two-and-a-half-dimple grin, “Your mother acts so nicely towards me. She really takes an interest.”

“Right,” said I.

Later, alone with me, Momma played piano whilst explaining just how sad Shirl and her mother really were. We’d earlier seen my friend downtown strolling arm in arm betwixt two huge adoring parents. “You know your Shirley’s mother’s idea of perfect beauty?” Momma asked. “Goldilocks is.”

“That’s mean!” I backed off, pointing.

Music ceased. Momma turned my way. “You’re right, of course. And I
repent, Lucille. It’s just, I want so much for you. I get ill-tempered when things interfere.”

I studied the freckled hand I’d pointed with. “Ain’t Shirley’s fault. You should be glad somebody still comes around. Blame me. I look funny. I talk bass ackwards. It’s me but, Momma? I try.” I poked one ivory high low note, I felt soiled and weak. She leaned forwards, lifted my either wiry braid, wound them into overlapping circles on my scalp. I reached up to touch this topknot, grinning, “Feels like a beanie.”

“Tiara,” she corrected me. Momma bent off her ebony stool. I looked at its feet, claw-and-ball and brass. She kissed my coarse tight crown. Momma kissed and kissed it. “You’ll do,” she purred. I saw: Her eyes were closed.

A TRAIN
wreck brought my folks together. Momma was twenty-two then, already a old maid by Falls’ standards. She’d been pursued by several likely boys who’d scented the inheritance. Not one fellow interested
her
. “Clothes-store mannequins,” she called them privately. Bored, she went on a trip with her older male cousin. This was a country outing into the godforsaken terrain near Bear Grass, North Carolina. Backwoods, all ponds there stagnant. The rich reckless older cousin owned a duck-hunting lodge out there.

To make the long story quick: Momma’s fifty-year-old cousin, jilted by a young lady friend, got drunk and—with my terrified momma in his buggy—someway decided to race a northbound train toward the Bear Grass crossroads. He did not actually decide this till he
saw
the train. His horse, it never decided. The black train barely noticed. Momma did. Her screams were mistaken for the crossing whistle by passersby. The drunk cousin’s timing proved terrible, fatal. His horse, forced to turn right at the crossroads, was struck at once, so was the dandy cousin. Momma got thrown free of tracks. She later said she recalled last thing, one thought: “So this is flight.”

When she woke nine hours later, she saw a makeshift splint—lathing and newspapers—already improving her broken right arm. “Lucille, I found myself in a tiny filthy farm hut. I’d seen better-looking stables but the humble folk there did act so generous. I hardly understood their speech. First I thought I was in Heaven, and that Heaven was a kind of Peasant Europe. Everything the color of straw. There was a rough boy hovering over me, pressing cool cloths to my forehead. My first sentence, hours later, was to ask his name. ‘Samuel,’ he said, and he winked. I laughed and fainted. I woke knowing more. The boy understood nothing of who I was, what I stood to inherit. Finally he asked me whom to notify. First I couldn’t remember, then pretended not to know. I pretended that for four sweet days. My poor parents suffered so during those days. But Samuel’s wit, his … well, his personal heat—contrasted so with my stuffed-shirt suitors from Summit. Samuel told the most charming stories. I drew strength from them. Especially the ones about cunning woodland animals. Delicious. I rested in
the sun, my eyes closed, listening. I felt like the child I’d been before a childhood accident I had. The older peasant couple gave me milk, still warm, directly from the cow that looked to be as much a hick as its owner, ribs all showing. Slowly, I grew stronger and finally felt quite certain. I never understood one word his parents said. Their kindness was replete but they were, well,
primitivo
, my dear Lucille. Your poor father seems to have been allotted the collected wit of the last four Bear Grass generations. One day he carried me, bodily, out into the tomato patch, direct sun. Tomato plants have an erotic odor. I asked him to please brush my hair. When he was behind me, doing so with a currying comb for horses, I believe (which I preferred to his mother’s far-from-hygienic hairbrush), I joked about someday finding the courage to ask a boy such as himself to marry a girl such as I. He did not say ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Try me.’ It was the most precious thing I’d ever heard. I turned. He lowered the currying comb. He had tears in his eyes.

“‘I’m Bianca,’ I said.

“‘Hot dog,’ dear dear Samuel replied. That is how my happiness began. I refrained from informing him about my being a McCloud as well, as in the Angus McClouds. (He’d never heard of us, or Poppa’s fortune in indigo. Which shows you how intensely rural Bear Grass then was.) My reckless bachelor cousin had sacrificed his disappointed life so I might find my own.”

Four days, Momma’d been considered killed or lost. People searched the train tracks for three miles, seeking jet buttons from her dress, her satin reticule maybe tossed into a ditch. Nothing was found. The locomotive wheels were scoured by police told the color of her hair. Grim business. The strain shortened her loving parents’ lives. Samuel Honicutt had discovered her groaning in a ditch. He’d seen the crowd around a derailed train nearby. He carried her home to his folks’ cabin one mile off in piney woods.

Now, feeling stronger, she had herself buggied into Falls so’s she could plan a wedding. Folks downtown at first considered Bianca McCloud a ghost. Her girlfriends thought she’d made up this romantic meeting as some byproduct of concussion. Humoring her, they agreed to be bridesmaids. It pleased some girls how Bianca’s wedding freed up her three serious suitors—plenty now for everybody. Local society soon heard about the noble rescuer, and they acted right excited to meet my poor poppa.

Now, darling, in most families there’s this split. One bunch is rich and graceful and not a little proud—their genes a tea party of p’s and q’s. The other clan is, well, a hornet’s nest of public teeth pickers, dud grammar, weak kidneys. But I got to say in all honesty, rarely was the split as wide as happened in our odd home.

Having chose a man from the suburbs of Bear Grass, Momma must’ve found his rough-cut history someway charming. At first she did. But the woman lacked the strength of character over time’s long haul. Her people
claimed one college vice president and many piano teachers. Is anybody more high-toned and refined-feeling than a small town’s three very best piano teachers?

Whereas my poppa’s great-granddad had been shot for being A.W.O.L. from the Revolutionary War. Family glory had been downhill from there. The Honicutts’ role in our national life had been deserting it right regular. Pop swore the shot soldier was only home for a day, just to lay in firewood for his pregnant wife, their kids. Momma said nothing for or against. Pop’s motleyest relation (low even for Bear Grass) perished of tapeworms. Fact. The wormy case got more interesting as the patient grew more peaked, and before the fellow knew it, his riders held the majority. Outvoted by his major stockholders, Pop’s poor cousin was kicked downstairs.

When Pop, as was his habit, tried making light of his unpretty history, Momma ofttimes said, “You, we love. But as for those others, we remain unamused.”

INDULGING
reasons all his own, Pop’s first service at All Saints Episcopal, he chose to make lower-body-gas noises (with his mouth) then flee the sanctuary.

After that, Pop was never exactly welcomed into Momma’s former set. Time hung what you might call heavy on his hands. When my little girlfriends came near our house, he’d pepper them with well-meant but dumb pranks. He’d cook up instant nicknames for each. The man would lumber at them on his knees—child-high across our marble foyer—one raw hand foremost, him saying, “Shake, Wee Jake.” Emily, she ran.

Nobody knew what to make of this grown fellow living in the porch swing all day, and working full-time at only being company for Momma. He begged my friends for tastes of their milk or cookie, he barged right into my door without so much as a knock. Odd that only Shirley, bashful as she was, knew how to talk right back to Pop. She called him “Mr. Card.” Once—when he rushed her, his hand out, running on his knees—she shoved him so hard he fell sideways and laid there, laying, saying, “Again, again.”

I stood apart, watching them together. Seemed I could be the mother or sister of them both. I crossed my arms. Felt like pleasure has swung open my whole chest, a mirrored medicine cabinet stuffed with patent cures.

If Shirl visited, Pop got all bossy, joshing. He loved to peeve Momma by misquoting scripture. In marrying him, she’d done her post-accident life’s one wild unexpected thing. But with that in place, she become a slave to the letter of the law in all else. She longed to be invited to the homes of her old girlfriends, now married to her three ex-suitors. Yes, old pals spoke to her on the street and at neighborhood do’s, but Poppa (home on the porch) stayed her social albatross. That I favored him seemed likely to drive my poor mother crazy. She never regretted choosing him, but his side effects sure made her sad around the house. All her ambitions turned on me now—
I would send the precious family genes diving back into the social swim. Good luck.

Pop was no churchgoer, claimed that his own funeral would be attendance enough. But he soon whipped out a pet Psalm for Shirley. He used it on her every night she slept in my room. “Why, look who we done trapped under our quilts,” he’d come in, teasing. “Shirley Goodness and Mercy, will you follow me all the days of my life? Please?”

She pulled sheets overhead—a modest thing to do but (from in there) chuckling proved she considered herself Miss Surely Worth the Attention.

When Pop finally left us alone, we played our secret game called “I Am Chicken Little.” For our own child reasons, with fingernails and hair pulling—with a wicked little hatpin I dearly dreaded—we’d hurt each other, sometimes a lot. Once when I caught a fever and Momma was undressing me, she reeled back from the sight of marks and nicks. “What
got
you, child?” Maybe Momma was recalling bugs. (Shirl always left worse marks on me than I seemed to manage. I felt sorry for her, stopping short. Shirl’s mother kept Shirley’s fingernails glazed in colorless lacquer, filed pointed, terrible.) Whoever gave in first had to squeal after long torture, “I
am
Chicken Little.” I never knew why we did this to each other. We played it once every ten days or so, for years.

POPPA
might’ve been cut dead by the fast crowd on Summit but he had another following. A certain kind of happy-go-lucky local bachelor and politico, pool sharps, black sheep from your best families—they stopped around each November, especially. Till this flush of company, Pop seemed pleased enough to sit alone on our porch swing, pretending not to know how unpopular he was.

But busy Novembers, people climbed onto our porch, come to ask Sam Honicutt’s election views. Like me, the man was a magnet for others’ gossip. The postmaster was a close buddy. Expecting company, Pop shaved for once, wore a boiled Sunday shirt. I helped him with his collar studs and cuff links. Even Captain Marsden stopped by, young then (for him), mid-forties. Rich and busy as Cap was, he arrived on our porch steps, hat in hand, nodding all around, a practiced quiet charm. I claimed the swing, hobbling, proud, silent for a change. Even the Captain (gloomy usually behind his warrior’s face) gave Poppa’s jokes wide grudging smiles.

Visitors asked for certain of his well-known stories. Especially the one where Jefferson Davis, hoping to avoid Yankee capture, dresses up in women’s clothes. Soon enough somebody’d say, “Well, Sam? What news of the Republican candidates this go-round?”

Daddy, democratic, started. “Listen, I ain’t hinting that their one up for mayor might dip his hand into our fair city’s kitty, but you’ve seen the size of the man’s wife, ain’t you, boys?” Pop paused to scratch his scalp. It looked like he was choosing what-all he’d speak next but, weeks before the election,
I’d watched him pace our back yard, planning, lips going. “Yeah, that poor Republican’s got to keep his wife in pastries someway—why, I ain’t claiming that his wife is
fat
, but I hear tell …” Pop looked around, lowered his voice, milking his crowd of respect. “That she’s so plump, she has to put a bookmark in her neck just to find her pearls at night.—Fact!”

Men yahooed. It was what they’d come for. They slapped porch uprights. “God’s native truth,” Pop kept straight-faced but barely. “Ask Lucy here. Ask my little Second Hand if it ain’t Gospel.” My job was to nod. I did so. So hard the porch swing squeaked its chains. But, just inside our screen door, I noted Momma’s stiff shape, arms folded, one foot tapping. Momma was already planning my coming-out party. She didn’t like to find her one child out here serving as a Little Xerxes minstrel-show straight man.

Only Momma counted Poppa’s Aint’s, and mine. When others swore that her Samuel could charm the birds out of the trees, couldn’t he? she’d draw herself up and, defended, claim
she
would know—having neither feather nor leaf anywheres on her.

Still, I figured she’d picked him, hadn’t she? With her indigo inheritance, with her good blank check of a face, Ma might’ve chose most any pretty rich boy in eastern North Carolina. Now, as then, there are thousands, God be praised. Instead, she’d proposed to a skinny county wag—one who’d saved her life, she claimed—a man Bianca McCloud Honicutt felt she could totally boss and totally enjoy.