Read Online Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus - Free Book Online

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.
6
    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 temperamentalsopranos. 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