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

much circled here and there in red. Two at a time, for days, altos sat beside the bachelor’s bed, they feared he’d take his life. Near the bed, sudden casseroles cooled and hardened. Altos sat with him in pairs because he was, after all, a man alone and wearing pajamas (marked with cleft signs). These were churchgoing women, after all—even if they knew this bald lost gent was not exactly a major menace to unchaperoned womankind. Women were his best friends. That was it. Women stayed the ones he blamed and yet the ones he cried to.
    Under their breaths, while the choirmaster slept, altos muttered: poor Winona was now cooking on a campfire in her yard, was sleeping—during summer storms and all—in a pup tent in her side yard. Somebody saw her patrolling her yard’s edges at night, lifting before her a canary cage she seemed to mistake for a lantern, seeking the one just man.
    COURTHOUSE SQUARE’S gimpy vets had spied Will Marsden walking blocks out of his way to avoid Winona Smythe’s house. He’d been back nearly a month but still dreaded that first visit. And who could blame him? Willie spent his Saturdays visiting spots where Ned and him had played. Far out past the ice plant, clear beyond Silver Lake, young Marsden was seen to wander. His new black boots were muddy from patrolling ditches where two boys’d onct trapped crawfish. Some of the old “camps” had been reclaimed by fresh batches of kids—the way birds’ll take over abandoned nests. Marsden seemingly approved. On the ground beside a tall sycamore, he left six dimes for the six black kids presently playing there. It was Nash County’s steepest sycamore and famous for that (in Nash County). From its topmost seasick limbs, you could spy clear to the poorhouse, high over and beyond the river Tar, almost to the forty steepled churches of Rocky Mount. Ned had got fired on while swinging from a sycamore. All this mattered to the mumbling young Marsden now squatting in a ditch nearby. His gold watch, still on loan from the Northern dead, rested open before him. His big dark hat rested on a forked stick jammed into the mud. Willie stared as black kids tilted the whole treetop side to side—he wore a strange stricken look. Seemed he expected the sycamore and all its children to explode in about thirty seconds. He checked his watch. Something strangewas going on with Willie Marsden, a bottling-up that’d pop out soon or later. Count on it—law of physics. And with Falls being the size it was, if somebody noticed him yonder alone in a ditch, this meant—in under two hours—most every single local soul had heard.
    People worried about him, true. (There are certain men that get noticed because they expect too little from the world. You want to tell the fellow, “Hey, you’re entitled. You especially.” This lack of hoping attracts others. Seems Mr. Gloom is full of liquid secrets, banked inside him. Oh, to wheedle a few loose, it’d be like siphoning pure gold honey from a ugly dusty hive. Nurses, ministers, romantics, children—and fools—
will
move toward these ones. Watch.)
    BASED on what I’ve seen here in Lanes’ End Rest, I could write me a whole new Surgeon General’s Warning for Your Health, like maybe: When you lose your looks, don’t repeat
don’t
expect to get treated as a beauty no more. Makes sense but you’d be surprised how strong a habit Habit is. (The physical beauty part is one thing the Lord never handed me and therefore never got to giggle whilst snatching back.) I try and warn former beauties, Find something else to get you through. Get
good
at something. Even if that means crafts—wood-burning yet another Sitting Bull’s head onto yet another pine plaque that’d rather stay plain pine.
    We have a rougher time trying to make our new-here men feel properly noticed. Notice is a kind of oxygen. The professor across the hall told me about a experiment done at some Mexican orphanage: won’t no nurse allowed to touch the