Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (72 page)

When Angus came inland from indigo growing, he entertained local mayors and some foreign guests. French was sometimes talked at dinner. Maimie listened at the cellos sawing underneath French’s surface jabber. Working in five decades of rich folks’ homes, Beech’s manner had slowly changed. She now kept her long neck extended at a haughty angle. Her pleated face stayed wide open with a look of full entitlement. At table, she was spared having to speak the native tongue of strange nations herself. This way, she could just enjoy the sounds—follow them from mouth to mouth. (Letters printed in Maimie’s Bible—the antlike dots and dragonfly squiggles—looked to her lots more like choir-book sheet music than signs for plain dull English. To Beech’s ear, French sounded much more Bible-days Oriental.) She sat here, awestruck but contained, following its music back and forth. For Beech, French became the official Psalmish gong-and-tinkle she heard steadily belling in her head.

And little Bianca eating right here—one hand stowed safe in Beech’s—this darling babe-and-suckling spoke the holy tongue.

TO FOLKS
most interested in rightful owners’ control, parenthood can be the hardest job of all
.

Later, waiting to know if his high-tempered pet would live or be a vegetable or what, handsome Angus McCloud lunged around the overdecorated home. He avoided a second floor where doctors buzzed near one baby swollen unrecognizable. Experts wore dark wasp-waisted coats. They’d buggied from far-off Richmond. Young local Dr. Collier had been bypassed, not good enough for this. Till now Angus had believed a person got what a person paid for. The oldest daughters hunted their addled poppa, floor to floor. Since the accident, girls wore black full-time. They’d sacrificed their major joy: they locked the lids of three massive pianos. Household mirrors were covered with jet crepe. Angus’ wife and elder girls found him crouched alone in the attic. Poor man was slowly tapping his right temple against one wooden upright. Strapping McCloud then galloped downstairs, he yanked velvet drapes off windows in twenty-nine steep and perfect rooms. “Light,” he called loud. “It’s light she’ll be needing more of.” He didn’t blame skinny zealous Maimie L. Beech for his daughter’s accident, though the culprits had been black as Miss Beech. Nurse could be heard now weeping
out in the garden house, tearing strips from her white uniform. (“I won’t asleep, just resting my eyes after ex-cess Bible reading.”) Angus’ womenfolk followed him chamber to chamber as he ripped down curtains. Daylight showed rooms full of floating dust—gold, yes, but gnatlike—a terrible corruption working everybody’s air. “Will ye look at it all,” he studied motes. “Two dozen people cleaning a house and they canna keep out pieces
this
size?—No wonder.”

Loved ones allowed this temporary madness, just the way they’d admired his earlier gift for managing.

“Let
him”—for some ladies, it’s a whole philosophy of life.

ANGUS
respected America’s Indians (“Ye have to hand it to them”). Angus praised Beech in front of company and mentioned her Tuscarora forebears: chieftains and lairds, no doubt. How could Maimie fall from being so wedged and high up, chapter and verse, in the House of Palms? Child, I’m getting to the accident and lapse.

Like lots of religious unschooled folks in those days—Maimie’d memorized well over a third of the Holy Scriptures. But when quoting from memory, she preferred to fake a somber reading of it. Didn’t matter if her selection came from Genesis or Revelation—Maimie always opened the Book midway to Psalms. At impossible speed, her finger blurred over printed lines. She sometimes paused, rubbing her eyes the way she’d noticed other readers do. Maimie Beech seemed to feel that reading—with its joys and power—must be very thrilling but mighty wearing on you. Jealous McCloud servants said they’d often seen Beech check the gold cross engraved across her Bible’s front. This was her guide in holding the book right side up. If the cross’s T bar was near the top, she knew she was safe from being discovered. Then her deep voice spoke God’s word with fresh, level authority.

Before the trouble, Maimie and her Bible arrived to work hours early. Long before Bianca woke around eleven, here came the black spinster armored in the crispest of white uniforms. She fondled the brass cross bobbing at her throat. She forever wore that perched unaddressed envelope of a nurse’s cap. While tiptoers waited for the baby of the house to rise, Cook let Maimie go sit in a place of honor, on the low three-legged in the stove’s corner of the kitchen. Maimie’s outfit was so starched: the first time she sat each day, you heard her break like pasteboard egg cartons.

She could rest over there for the longest time, staring down into a Bible big as any cookbook. Other servants sniggered. The chief gardener sometimes asked, “What
you
studying on so hard today, Miss Famous Maimie Beech?” And—convicted—furious, without even lifting her head, the woman would suddenly spout four minutes’ worth of Leviticus, citing chapter and verse, finger blurring at a angel’s speed over one page of Psalms. She seemed to consider that a book was like a bucketful of water—pretty much the same contents floated on its top as on its bottom. Dip in anyplace, all water. The text she wanted would rise, up up through pages—drawn to the bait and
lure of so hardworking a fingertip. Maimie got no credit for these feats of memory. She could sure concentrate. The selfsame focus she usually pinned on some scared flattered child, Beech now pegged square upon one page. The old woman paused only to massage strained eyes. She did it with such conviction, child, you found: your own had started burning.

IN ACCEPTING
this job, she’d told Angus, “Can’t stay here long. Maimie likes them young.”

Miss M. L. Beech always gave notice the day her babies turned six. White folks believed Maimie just specialized in toddlers. But truth is, she couldn’t bear it when the children found her out.

Till school spoiled things, Maimie might sit, with some beautiful picture book opened in her lap, a living baby tucked snug under either arm, and—free as air or water—spin out any tale she chose. It felt like swimming and walking at the selfsame time—a promenade along some river’s glassy lid. Her lore was partly fairy tales like one about a poppa-king whose golden touch proved butterfingered. Her lore was partly Bible rehash, part neighborhood gossip from Baby Africa downhill, partly whatever stepping-stone footholds the pretty pictures gave. Her finger was careful to skim to and fro, fro and to—a dorsal fin keeping her afloat. Beech’s tales ofttimes starred little dervishes she’d tended at other rich white homes in Falls. Her latest charges felt right honored to join a list of local children already so famous they’d been wrote up in national books.

Years back, a child Maimie’d shepherded through six years and thousands of changed diapers—betrayed her. This blond-ringleted boy, a Saiterwaite, was the first to do so: She never planned to live through that again. He sat listening—he watched her needling clockly finger move over the dark wasp shapes swarming in rows, shapes she’d patiently explained to him were Letters. He had only been a schoolboy for six weeks. He piped loud in front of adults,
“That’s
not what this book says, Maimie. You just make it up. I think you made up every book you ever told me. Did you, Maimie, hunh?” She smiled at him, tears stood thick as lenses in her either pouchy eye. Come morning she politely resigned, moving next door to the neighbor’s brand-new baby, a baby who’d admire and forgive Maimie Beech till school unlocked the mystery of a black-and-white page.

Maimie might have stayed the honored servant in one home forever. She might’ve lived on long after the household children grew up and moved out. But she felt determined: learning to read by
seeming
to read. That and some restless curiosity kept her changing jobs every six years, minimum. Maimie’d considered asking one trusted employer to please help her learn her letters. Beech knew how avid, grand, and Old Testament her own mind was. She surely had the deepest
will
to know. But asking meant admitting, didn’t it? Doesn’t it always? Bosses would find: She’d been lying all along—they’d go and tell their children (hers). False-reading was Maimie L. Beech’s only lie. As a serious Christian woman—she suffered for it daily.

A GIFT
Beech bought my momma led to both their downfalls. I often wondered who Momma might’ve been without this—and who, in turn, child, I might’ve managed becoming. Actress, scholar, teacher—anything! Beech lost her place of honor in the mansion and at table. Her Main Street dignity toppled, too. A child thrashed half dead upstairs. The mansion and its staff stayed unmusical and overlit in penance. Everything was said in harsh un-Psalmish English. Doctors refused to even let old Nurse go near the little victim. They idly blamed Beech without quite saying so. Twice they’d found her sleeping on the hall floor outside the sickroom—her head resting on the huge black book.

Next dawn, Mr. and Mrs. McCloud heard Maimie arrive for work that early. She had banished herself to the back yard. She’d asked to spend the night in the gazebo. She was denied permission. What first sounded like a mourning-dove reunion proved to be Miss Maimie’s endless scripture-quoting vigil. Angus rose, looked out. A fat Bible rested open across Beech’s long bone thighs. Her black finger speeded so, it tore one page’s precious tissue. She pressed it back, apologizing to the Book, mashing the tear like it might heal. Beech, her prim hat knocked off-center, sat hunched on a lawn bench whose cast iron made it look formed all of ferns—petrified ferns wanting more than anything to serve one person as group-effort fern furniture.

From the upstairs window, my grandpoppa, Angus, listened at chanted Old Testament lamentations—ones so suitable for awful troubles and, therefore, child, too often far too suitable for you and me. (Might be one reason the Book is the second best-seller of all time. Behind the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. A fact. Look it up.)

McCloud came lordly down the stairs. Cook still slept. In his tasseled robe, Angus personally made tea for Maimie. (A newly rich Jack-of-All-Trades, he loved mornings best—each one seemed born with a message printed on its lower left border: “Imagine your name in this space.” Angus’ pride was worldwide shop talk plus knowing how to do most everybody’s chore just a bit better.) Of his efficient household staff’s two dozen souls, he’d only felt awe at Maimie’s mischief-squashing talent. Now, she too had proved mortal, disappointing. Why was Angus always surprised when another minor wizard slipped? It hurt him every time.

Wearing just his robe, he carried out a tea tray, one warmed scone. Beech blurted what she’d had all night to prepare: That day it’d happened? She’d only blinked after reading the Good News too long in a row. Her baby slipped right off.
“Now
look what’s gone and grabbed her. Lord bound to punish Maimie. Unh-huh. ‘Eye for eye.’ Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:20, Deuteronomy 19:21, Matthew 5:38. ‘Eye for eye.’ You watch.”

“We must never talk like that,” Angus said. He explained he wanted Beech to eat and drink while he could see her. She’d lost weight she couldn’t spare. His indigo-blue robe’s hem was wet with dew. He pulled satin around his red-haired legs, settled beside Maimie. Both folks could hear the household waking. They could see three daughters’ heads peek out. Servants soon studied this odd pair resting side by side in a green back yard as green as greenbacks.

Angus said he remembered how, like him, Maimie was a orphan. He said he understood how this made such family as a person finally found (and founded) mean all the more to that person, did it not? “That person …” she began but nodded instead, “person … so sorry.” Her hands kept opening and closing her Bible, its cover flexed the way a perched butterfly will cure its wings in sunlight. Angus, watching, understood she hardly noticed. He reached over and—with a tender manly touch—stopped her. “Oh,” Beech said, ashamed.

Angus shifted more her way. In full daylight, she looked refined and yet—blinking—seemed mystified at where her power’d gone. McCloud regretted that her secret weapon must stay a secret now—unpatented. He onct imagined having Maimie dictate a short book’s worth of how-to’s at one of his secretaries. Since the accident, Miss Beech looked so stranded—something with its wings clipped, a poor buzzard forced to hobble forever along the ground. McCloud asked that Beech please go home today, just rest. He swore he’d send word if their wee child’s health changed, either way.

“Our wee child,” his ripe baritone allowed itself the sloppy luxury of repeating. In him, words’ sweetness released a wallop so dark and syrupy it became almost a poison. The big man let hisself again feel what losing poor Bianca’d mean. The last time Angus indulged this, he’d raged around the homeplace tearing down stifling drapes.

Now, not even planning to, he reached out, took up this old woman’s black bone-rake of a hand. He squeezed it, saying,
“We
underrstood her.” Maimie only nodded. Angus saw her face split, podlike. Weeping, her wrinkles softened from the deepest center creases outward. Each of Maimie’s braids, tipped with rag, seemed worn to blot one tear.

These two people, holding hands, soon felt semi-embarrassed, child—but not enough to stop. Angus, consoled by Maimie’s touch, saw fit to cry in a steadied determined way. Tears, leaving him, seemed Grief’s most natural dividend. Beech sat still, swallowing hard, admiring his ease, fighting back her own strange need to scream, to fall against him, begging, blaming. Fifty-nine years of doing good. Now this. No credit. A person got no credit. Her account was all Checking. No Savings. Nothing saved.

Maimie waited to know what emotion—if any—would be possible here with everybody looking. Angus’ solemn gulps sounded so much like his baby daughter’s. Beech had comforted hundreds of crying white children but never a grown white boss, and surely not whilst holding that gent’s pink cabbage rose of a hand.

She knew that under his slippery Bible-days robe, Angus must be naked as a boy child. This held no mystery or charm for her. Just made her feel the sadder for them both and for Bianca upstairs.