Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (103 page)

“Over my dead body,” goes I, rushing back to my workroom for David’s harp made entirely of paper clips and rubber bands.

We stood waiting for Cap to stow the new ones under our bed. By now he came home with a few items weekly, sometimes dumping prizes on the table like he hoped I’d plop them, calibered carrots, into some family stew. By now, beneath our fourposter, he had a elephant gun, cute ivory derringers about the size of dice cozy in their own velvet caskets. I thought of the Alamo’s own arsenal under our mattress at night, there on the dark floor—daring any dust to accumulate around them. Guns soon felt somewhere between being our roommates and a snake farm, one that might snag a woman’s ankle when, at 3 a.m., she trotted off to get three wakers water.

THERE’S
good news and bad news: The good is that soon our Sunday-school Annex’s curtains, still screening your present age group from your past and future, soon fell open like a Jericho of shower curtains. And all to see my “show.” I tried avoiding the word “show,” which, for Baptists, has a low tinselly tone. “Show” hints at loose women and high admission prices, sin sin sin. If the wickedness us Baptists Imagined was half the fun of wickedness only Lived, we’d have reason to go somewhere and be real bad. I called mine “presentations” or “visual aids,” but “show” made kids happier and they wouldn’t quit calling mine that. Let them say Show.

If youngsters soon hung around our house, pointing at the shut door of my sewing room and listening, whispering to Lou (who, I believe, charged admission)—kids whispering, “Is she in there, doing it for Sunday?”—if kids loved the undullness of my visual aids, other long-suffering church teachers, long starved for a novel way to teach the Bible, struggling many years for some new tack to take, decided one by one that this won’t it. Mine won’t. Someway I knew this when I seen them lined against the back wall’s bulletins and fruit-tinted lithos of Our Lord. Arms all crossed, each was dressed in mourning dark. I soon saw them as a set of black castles, eager limits towering over the low foreground of curly golden laughing children’s heads. The more noise kids made when Saul threw his spear at the harp-playing David and so forth, the quieter my grown fellow-teachers got. Joyless, no lips, the lot of them. Just made me gush and imagine all the more. I dared them to fire the best darn Visual Effect by a Supporting Baptist. Let them try. My young audience would have their old dry lipless heads on a platter! See, I’d turned Gloria Swanson overnight! Vanity about vanities.

Soon, other religions were after me like ducks on a June bug. I even got a feeler from the twenty catacombed Catholics over in Rocky Mount, but I wrote a note that said I only did short-range travel with my sho … visual aids. At Lucas’, I ran into my old Sunday-school teacher whose voice
was like the sound her nickel-rimmed spectacles might make. She was still at it, one lowered cotton drape from mine, still complaining. “Well, well,” said she. “Aren’t
you
the clever one, it’s our Lucille. Everybody’s talking about your little Old Testament flea circus or whatever it is, and though it charms the children to the point that when I pull my curtain afterwards and try to discuss the holy mysteries, pupils’re keyed up to talk only about the color of the
wigs
on this week’s nuts, and though I think you’re smarter than I ever thought you were when you and the late Shirley gossiped through your years under me, I must say that, bright and ‘modern’ as it all is, one thing I feel sure your lessons aren’t, my child, is
DEEP
. Good day.” I was left feeling stunned and shallow in the extreme, darling. Cheap.

The playboy lieutenant governor still hunted ducks and took along a certain white-haired vet storyteller. The state spent gas money and probably bullet money, too, for a motorcade clear down to Duck, North Carolina (the name given to a town by wishful thinkers—a form of decoy). Limos zipped past shanties of those who should be fed by the state funds. Captain spent all his charm with the big boys of our state. News of our small-time Gloomy Monday finally seemed to reach him. Not even new guns could cheer him up around the house. While I was enjoying newfound fame among the youthful Baptists of the Greater Falls area—and here’s the earlier-mentioned
bad
news (how should I put it gentle?)—he hit me a few more times. Two. Maybe three.

Here I was, bound onstage weekly before the entire Sunday school, and suddenly I was sending Louisa to the dime store for foundation makeup to disguise a blacked eye. The first. Ruth, next door, noticed one day while I was out hanging up the clothes. She had the face of a secret drinker (though—to be fair—we never caught her). Poor Ruth bent over our fence, spied a lump above my eye, and said, just so I could hear, “There’s worse things than a husband who loves but leaves. Some of us’d rather be proud and alone, Lucille. Is what I think,” then drifted inside, limp as her wash dress. I pitied her. And mostly agreed. But I now knew to hide my war wounds better.

My husband still muttered in his sleep, shouts of artillery danger, naming childhood friends but mixed with recent daytime news. A whole night’s worth might run: “Nine dollars a head and not a nickel over … said I shouldn’t … vines’ll just
grow
faster … got face cards every time, Ned. Ned? Duck, duck!” I’d lay awake listening, still trying to feel like feeling sorry for him. Not so sure, a ice pack on one eye.

I will say: This was the last of that part. Seemed connected to my puppet reputation at First Baptist. The more times folks came up and complimented him, the less he went to church.

Onct when he was being sweet, I asked him what him and the Lieutenant Governor and other poker guys discussed at Duck, in blinds at dawn. We were alone in bed and my husband turned to me without a pause, “Pussy.”

“Oh.”

“Pussy ‘n’ money, money ‘n’ pussy. The order varies.”

“Don’t mind my saying so, sir, but it sounds kind of strange to go all that way to the coast just to grab-ass each other, you know? To me, anyways.”

“We
know
it’s dumb, Lucille. That’s what you women never seem to recognize. We
like
that. We find it a relief from all these duties that you and these children are always weighing us down with. Do you know how much is
eaten
in this house? It’s fun to act like boys again when we get to, and you know what, Lucille? We
get
to. But enough small talk, there’s a topic I’ve felt a certain burning urgency to discuss with you and you alone. Only you can help me with it.”

I felt wary but, too, half drawn. “So what’s that? Shoot.”

“Poos-say. As my black brothers pronounce it. Pussy, Lucy. Specifically, your own.”

This is sick. It was us, though, and I’m telling. I put up with it. Probably I was asking for trouble. And you might think me twisted, child, but some-ways, most parts that mattered, I liked it. When he breathed his own sad smut my way, I stayed for it, didn’t I? You either stay or leave. For now, till what-all happened next, I stuck right there and took what he dished out.—And I blame myself for everything that followed, child. Really, I should be in jail now.

HE WAS
not a happy drunk. Losing the money set him back. Drink made him talk war. “Sorry,” he’d say after biffing me, and sit on our horsehair couch with his face in his hand. He knew it was rolling out of him, him muttering figures, how eleven states left the Union, twenty-three stayed, twenty-four counting West Virginia, rough odds at best and no wonder the two hundred and thirty thousand fellow Rebs had been so wounded, two hundred thousand of his Southern brothers killed outright, and on and on he kept the score. He seemed to want (some Fridays especially) to hit me. I saw that look, I handed him a pillow, “Duck feathers are in there, hero, go to it.” Fridays were bad. I’d rather it happened on Monday—Friday meant a shiner really bloomed in time for my precious Sunday-morning hour onstage.

The last shiner, I gave him notice. He’d just hollered, “That’s for Wilson’s Creek.” A war skirmish’s name, I guessed.

“For
what?”
I screamed and ran his way across the room and pulverized his shoulders. “I plan to get out of here if you lay a hand on me ever again, ever! Give me it back, now. I want back everything you’ve ever took from me, which means most everything.”

From behind two huge hands covering his face, he said, “Where would you go? You having gentleman callers?” I saw he was smiling, so certain.

“Very funny man,” I said, not sure.

Then we’d make up. You figure it out.

•   •   •

NOW DAYS
folks get divorced if the other person looks puffy at breakfast or has what these TV ads call “morning breath.” Meaning halitosis. Typical, such ads change two of the most beautiful words in English, “morning” and “breath,” into the title of a stink curable with one product only. Back then you contracted till death do you part or till your husband’s body parted from its spirit, whichever came first. I rode it out, God knows.

Ruth’s Willard used to knock her cockeyed twice a week and she’d come over with a beefsteak mashed to one eyeball, a beefsteak that I, being on a stricter budget, would’ve loved to swipe—even with Ruth eyelashes on it—for a nice little lunch. And now here she was giving me lectures on the joys of being alone and uninjured.

Some tacky tango cranked up, and we could see Ruth through the window, cross-stepping in the middle of the floor of one huge unfamilied room. “Poo Wooth,” Baby sighed, watching. Once more I scolded my prettiest girl for lisping so. Ned was, I reckon, finer-featured than our Baby. She had a kind of ready surface peachiness, she flared it at all comers, working on them curls and nails, mad for matching accessories, at age eight. Ned, quiet, favored some statue from Greece, a perfect if eyeless boy whose features seemed more natural that far into the past. His face was almost too refined to bear a world as spiky and overtimed as this recent one is. Neddie was one of them kids where: if we were out and he ate candy and his hands got sticky, he stared at them, whimpering, half crazy from the goo till you
had
to find a sink for him so he could see the world again. He moved dreamy. When I attended to some back-then version of a PTA open house, his this year’s teacher, always a lady, would call me aside and say, “What
is
it about our Ned?” They were not complaining, they were showing me they’d caught the dreamy quality in those eyes that rarely seemed to blink, that steadily stayed a good gray percentage of his face. It was a privilege to be around that kind of beauty and made your waiting on the others almost easier, him silent at their middle, watching your very-close veins very close. I kept learning from his patient eyes.—Oh, what do people
do
that don’t have children, child?

NOT ONCT
did Captain mention how folks had praised my shows. Not onct did he ask me what I was fixing to stage come Sunday. Never did he tell me that the time I spent in yonder was a nuisance, or that I had his full permission. He withheld it all, and me? Darling, four wild horses and boiling hot oil and all the vexations visited on the saints couldn’t have made me ask his opinion of myself in this. Over my dead body. I figured that if they put up signboards downtown praising me as some new local attraction mentioned by the Chamber of Commerce “Register of Sights: Curiosities of Interest in the Gateway to the Threshold of the Peanut Capital of Eastern North Carolina,” if my shows were on every lip, it’d be good in how it showed up his stinginess, begrudging me my one new pleasure. I wanted him to be ashamed of being ashamed of me.

Then he arrived at one of my shows. Adults had started slipping into the back of the Annex. They’d arrive for church a bit early or their own Sunday-school classes would break up. “Young Adults” especially never lasted long. I was there, being helped by my own kids—envy of all—while Ned worked the Victrola that Ruth donated after seeing a certain episode based on the Book of Ruth—which she took grandly to be about husbandless her. Cap arrived during the escape from Egypt of a sizable number of hickory-nut players, pursued in chariots of Blue Tip Match boxes on wheels from certain busted toys of Ned (some he busted just so’s we’d have a suitable Pharaoh fleet, greater love hath no boy). I seen a familiar black suit and white beard. A easterly span of platinum watch chain over vest, all a sideline blur in black. He watched the show. He stayed for the applause. He left and never mentioned it to me or the stagehands, his own flesh and blood.

I could’ve throttled him.

NEXT SUNDAY
, churchbound, our babies were lined two by two behind us when, on sidewalk up ahead, I seen a short dark girl handing out pink leaflets. She won’t colored or Cherokee—but a foreign-looking ragamuffin with tangled black hair that just cried out for some mother’s comb. She was barefoot, on Sunday! Cap swept past her. I wanted to grab a flyer but thought better of it. So when, regretting, I looked back, when I saw that six of my nine now walked whilst reading one flyer apiece, I felt relieved and blessed.

Only after service, at home, whilst hanging up their Sunday bests, did I pilfer a few pockets. I found one such notice that Ned—during church—had folded into a paper football, one that him and the twins thumped back and forth over a hymnal. I stood by a window in our boys’ dormitory and opened the pink page:

Well, well, well. It listed a chancy side street down by the peanut mill near where my Shirley onetime lived. In my hand, pink paper felt cheap, it’d bled rouge onto skin healing from a rooster spur’s scratch. The notice’s
printing looked done on some press the size of a toaster. Ink plugged all
o
’s and
a
’s. But for some reason, this and the intuition spelling made the Mrs.’ promises seem truer and more dear to me. Plus, behind the flyer’s address, somebody’d handwritten: “Walk Up one Flight.” Which made me think of a whole new promised level waiting, angels one floor and a cut above.