Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (77 page)

At midnight Beech someway trekked into countryside, never more than six minutes from Falls’ most urban center spot. At Meacham’s farm and apiary, something happened. Versions of it change with whoever chooses to tell you. Some claim Beech tried drinking the perfume as poison. Most agree she drenched herself with scent. Next morning, footprints proved she’d
walked back and forth before the hives, kicking a few. But bees, helpless day workers, stay home at night.

The broken perfume bottle was found under one of three rope beehives that Famous Maimie Beech overturned. Seems she smeared herself with honey. Morning showed a hillside clotted with wax comb and gritty syrup. Many trapped bees floated under amber, stuck in sweetness they’d spent lifetimes making.

Maimie Beech then marched herself through Meadows’ Pasture to the river. Maybe bees were stinging her the way she wanted bees to. Maybe she was only sticky and perfumed, a mess, disappointed. The river seemed the one place a person could be safe. Maimie opened her Bible and placed it on a flat rock near the roadway, the rock where ladies fished. No name was written in the book, just one X traced over many times to make it clearer and more hers. But the volume was bigger than anybody else’s hereabouts and would be recognized. Its center had been most worn away, leaving Psalms a frilly cavity betwixt the terrors visited on faithful Job and the bossy hope of Proverbs. I imagine Maimie smelling the river, sighing many Psalms aloud, practically chugging them. I see her noticing the moonlight wavering on water like some flaming path or giant tongue. I imagine her good shoes testing water’s temperature. I hear Famous Maimie Beech saying to the river, to the night and world: “Open up. It’s me.”

She steps off a rock into our river Tar. Easy to picture her starched cap becoming a little folded-paper-looking sailboat, breezing away without her. Maybe she planned to briefly run over the water’s moonlit top, maybe she settled for walking on the surface, only to discover that she couldn’t stroll much of anywhere except along the mud bottom, a bottom that dips to thirty-five feet there by our town’s namesake Falls.

THE BODY
didn’t turn up for the longest time. Later rumors swore that when four scared shad-seeking white boys fished her out near a factory up near Tarboro, she had traveled further from Falls proper than ever before during her lifetime. With sun’s bleaching, with her soaking in the tannic acid from a shoe-polish plant outside Tarboro, the bloat of her had been someway bleached. It made identifying all the harder.

Tarboro authorities announced finding a “possible elderly Indian nurse.” Falls had sent the official missing-person notice but if you’re a town Tarboro’s size you don’t absorb the expense of having a body crated up and put on the Atlantic Coastline spur train till you know whose body it’s been. The Tarboro sheriff looked for ways to learn this. Not by dental records, since this particular person’s dental work had just meant taking out the hurtingest tooth one at a time. Nothing was ever put back in (which is all that really helps you to identify—the gold and silver additions. Those, people keep track of).

Sheriff Cooper (cousin to
Falls’
Sheriff Cooper) spied a cross-shaped
brass locket round this neck so swollen that he had to break the chain to get it off. He opened the latch and pressed a pulp of wet paper inside, paper oozing water like a eye. Sheriff then set the locket near his office wood stove all day. He found he could finally make out what each dried thing had been. Using a knife, he peeled off one layer at a time. In order, here were modern type of photos moving back toward daguerreotypes, then tintypes: likenesses of thirty-nine white children. Some grinned. Many looked forced to do so. From a mischievous-looking curly girl at the front, Sheriff worked backward. Then, against the locket’s very metal, he saw a red sticker and, finally, some writing that looked promising as ID.

“Okay, now,” he took the locket to his cleanest office window. He held it up, squinted hard, then read aloud to sunlight:

A Woolworth’s Special Value 29¢

SISTERS
found the bank check on her table still un-Xed. Blue paper was weighted by bronze salt and pepper slippers. The loving choir members had already scanned every page of Maimie’s sticky Bible, looking for some jotted clue. Friends plundered Maimie’s house till they destroyed its true first order and couldn’t get stuff back the way it’d been. Still, they kept seeking some explanation. Maimie had got the McCloud tribute money. She had returned to church. So why’d she go and do this godless thing?

Maimie Lucille Beech’s best friends kept patiently ransacking her shelfs and counters, seeking a note. It would maybe accuse my granddad, Angus McCloud, it’d maybe say he’d done some deed beyond unfair hiring/firing. Maybe he had “touched” Maimie. What if something off-color had gone on? This seemed unlikely but the women wanted to see blame placed where it belonged. They felt ready to accept Maimie’s word for who to accuse.

Sisters quit hunting long enough to sit around her kitchen table. They sat looking at the bronze booties, one filled with white salt, one black pepper. Who had these tiny shoes once fit? Some plump sixty-year-old grandpoppa uphill? It made them sick to wonder.

Sisters felt tired and cross—almost cross with Maimie. The harder they looked for her last message, the deeper they felt: She’d never exactly been
like
them. Maimie had believed. That’d forced her to do so foolish. She believed too much in Them uphill. She disappeared when Them uphill stopped seeing her. She considered their eyesight some Sun that can kill you by just looking away. And ladies decided, Maimie’d partly valued the Sisters because, like her, they’d been so shamelessly interested in the ones uphill, in Power of such bright white voltage that it sometimes passed for love.

Maimie had once seemed these women’s aging child. That now made them group mothers of a suicide. (If the hardest thing on earth is losing your own child, how much rougher losing that child
to
that child?—Why?)

They rose again in grouchy unison. “Well,” two said. Rubbing lower backs, they turned and hunted the note in places they’d already checked twice. (Sisters had their own reasons for sadness and the little daily rages. But their friend’s reasons interested and puzzled them. They wanted to give Maimie Beech a last fair chance at listing hers.)

Finally one lady snapped strong fingers, “She
couldn’t …”

“Read nor write,” somebody added.

“Which mean: no note,” another explained. “No way she
could
tell us.”

Then they all went home. They felt guilty but released into their safer crowded lives. Afterward, even as their needing one another grew keener, the surviving Sisters would never again be quite so much a unit. At church, even while singing, they would look at one another, hard. They’d always known everything that loving friends can do for each other. Really, so much! But now these women knew what they
couldn’t
do for each other. It made them afraid. They resisted this but: it made them almost afraid of each other.

ONE
excellent final question can often run you:
The money that set so much motion, where’d those big bucks come from?

Well, like I said: Cotton and 1851–88, a small but profitable shipping line out of Wilmington. But mostly indigo—one cash crop that proved of short-lived value. The plant itself was suitable to marsh-growing conditions that rice favors. Indigo got named for first being used in India. Its dye made a violent if heavenly violet blue. One drawback: the tint tended to streak. It got replaced by quicker, easier chemical processes just after our story ends.

Since indigo’s moneymaking days are gone forever (and even if they should come again), I want to now reveal my grandpoppa Angus McCloud’s unwritten-down but passed-by-word-of-mouth secret recipe. If he knew I was telling this, the man would probably spin in his bronze casket. Angus who lived such a long full life and ran for governor twice and lost twice. Angus who gained enough gold so one day he turned around and saw it all behind and under him, who suddenly understood the value of his touch and soon got stiff and precious over it, and frozen. He panicked he would lose everything. He stopped finding ways of making, and turned to ways of keeping, and was lost. First he became a Republican and then moved beyond that till folks claimed he should’ve run for state office—not on the Republican ticket, but on the Royalist one. These things happen, even to the self-made, especially them. Child? Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty.
That
ain’t getting ahead!

The chemicals you need I’ve never really laid eyes on or touched. Still, their names I know. My poor old magpie mind just works this way. So here goes the family money’s secret finally in black and white:

Take one part powdered indigo to two parts ferrous sulfate, combine and stir. Steep with three parts of slaked lime. Then, before allowing your brew to perk for the three needed days, add—finally—two hundred parts water
.

AT MAIMIE’S
funeral, most white McClouds and nineteen of their black staff arrived in a right stately queue. Angus and his silent diplomatic wife were accustomed to doing the right thing. Locally they’d grown famous for it. Servants hadn’t planned attending, they’d disliked Maimie’s privateness, her scholar’s airs. But one direct order from Angus, and here they mostly were. A skeleton crew had been left to mind the Mansion McCloud. Of course, young Bianca McCloud won’t present at this particular burial.

Her three big sisters had offered to play suitable six-hand funeral pieces. Their poppa even volunteered getting the three Steinway grands downhill from Summit to Gethsemane Garden True Gospel Afro-Baptist here near the river. Preacher felt certain whispered doubts about his old church floor’s willingness to support that kind of show-off weight. And though he thanked the young ladies, Rev. did let hisself wonder aloud if
their
type of Europe music would be sufficiently homey or fitting for the end of a person as Christian, local, and unemployed as the late Miss Maimie Lucille Beech.

These quiet girls, denied permission after practicing two days straight, still felt determined to do something right for Beech. They hinted to Poppa: He might offer pallbearers use of the healthiest palm plants, might have greenery sent down to Garden True Gospel for the service. Maimie’d onct asked permission to come uphill and water all the palms one Palm Sunday (her day off, too). She seemed to like these plants for secret reasons all her own. Girls sometimes caught Beech standing under one’s droopy overhang, green fronds throwing louvered shadows on her dried dark skin. Her eyes would be closed, loose braids poking like feathers through a leafy weave. Her thumb and finger might be joined to hold the tip end of one branch that she tugged slightly. Seemed its fibers sent her coded vibrations: news or poetry, the fullness thereof. So Angus said: Liked palms, did she? fine, sure. And after breakfast he called aside his third gardener, mentioned which wagon should be used. Angus said to deliver, say, the mansion’s twelve top plants and get them into the church and set up well before the service began, and to retrieve them at a decent longish interval afterwards—so black folks would remember just their being beautifully
present
, and not get confused by seeing them fetched back home too overcarefully, and so forth. Understood?

Parents had left their little Bianca uphill today, unsupervised upstairs. She’d never let them hire a replacement nurse. Bianca’s hair was now growing out, if somewhat darker. (Angus’d wanted to buy a wig for his invalid, one made of real human hair from Irish girls who arrive at the hair brokers every five years and let theirselves—whilst weeping, quiet, resigned—be practically scalped for the money. It pleased a Scot to purchase Irish hair for his American daughter. But Bianca’s mother, in the one thing she will
say within our story, rose up during dinner, slammed her fist on the table, shouted how: a wig of stranger’s hair would only further lure death and tempt fate. “My child will wear a wig over my dead body.” And sat again, having stated this strange picture.)

MR. AND MRS
. McCloud felt like their Bianca had meant it: in asking to stay home and practice scales on her new piano. Starting so far behind her sisters, the girl was really struggling to catch up. You had to admire the hours she put in, even if she maybe lacked their natural gifts. Worried about leaving her, parents finally decided that, after all, the cook, groom, and head gardener would be just downstairs if Bianca needed anything and called out for a snack or help.

Angus McCloud now listened at the white-robed church choir clapping near Miss Maimie Beech’s pine box. Its lid was mercifully shut. Borrowed palms swayed, semi-African, trembling with music and the choir’s pooled breath. A blue envelope stuffed with bills crackled inside Angus’ breast pocket. His check written to Maimie had never been returned for payment. He planned making a notable donation to her church today. But Angus slowly recalled: Collections aren’t taken during funerals.

Which was pretty silly—especially with
him
present. Angus sat staring into one of his rosy hand’s opening and closing. A fly kept buzzing on the windowsill nearby. Angus imagined profits that would’ve gathered by now to the importer of that first beehive from Holland in 1602. Imagine if the guy could’ve just kept bees under lock and key, then issued further hives to other immigrants—franchises. But of course, if your company bees are going to bring home decent honey, you
have
to let them fly off loose, free all day. They’ll soon branch out on you. They leave. You cannot hold them.

Angus had liked Maimie. He tried imagining how any employer might’ve treated her more justly. Accidents will happen, what the boys in insurance call “acts of God.” Head lowered, he half smiled: There’d been the first time Beech ever saw him come downstairs in full Scot regalia. She’d spied his kilt, she lost all usual dignified reserve. Beech clamped one hand over her mouth and giggled, pointing. Everybody laughed along with her. Angus—fists knuckled on his hips, feeling handsome and powerful and patient astride the third stair step—grinned, “So, what
is
this I’m a-presently wearing, Maimie Beech?” (One reason you keep servants—getting their news of you, how they “read” you.)