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

and I felt so, like, totally fritzed, I grabbed the pinking shears and then my mom’s Lady Norelco and, well, the rest is history. We hang out at the Mall. People are so rude. We’re just showing them that we’re, you know, resisting it all. They feel that, and boy they just hate you for it. My friend, Jason? he keeps his unbelievably neat, his stretches from here to here. My boyfriend’s is star-shaped.”
    “Your boyfriend’s what, sugar?”
    “His hair, dummy. Sorry. But you have a dirty mind. You do, Luce. Down and dirty. How can you be so old and still think about it just nonstop? I hope I don’t, not then. Some days I’m sick of it already. You’re always asking me this bizarre-o stuff. I’ve already told you way too much about him and me. Way way too. I don’t know. I guess I hope you won’t remember. Between visits. Others in here lose it week to week.
    “I mostly just tell you stuff because you’re here and can’t move and I need to … to tell. But you? you always remember. It’s not fair almost. I don’t think you’d
use
it against me, but who can anybody trust? Remember about in the car, at night, that time in the car with the three of them? I’m sorry, Luce, but you keep hoping for more pay dirt. You keep expecting I’ll be … personal. Jason wants to make his into a swastika but he’s redheaded and did you ever try and make
your
red hair be a swastika?”
    I admitted as how I hadn’t, yet.
    “Well, swastikas are super-hard to see unless you’re standing right over the person or if they lean way down to
show
you, and that’s not cool, especially not at the Mall. We’re just there, minding our own business andthese, like, hicks—do the rest. They start stuff. Sorry about unloading on ‘hicks’ too. Look, maybe we better just get back into this oldtimey story junk you keep asking for.”
    “Fine, sugar, didn’t mean to pry none, just struggling to stay ‘up to the minute.’ It’s a job, ain’t it?”
    Dickens is about to have Bill Sikes throttle little Oliver to death and Zondro reads this like tonight’s TV listing, no, without that much juice. Her tone sounds a regular robot’s—but at least her hair plans to be a prank. I
think
she means it partway as a joke. See, I’m trying and catch on. Darling? you got to really work at that to stay alive, don’t you?
    But, yeah, getting back—for around here, in 18 and 60–65, never leaving your small house, intermarrying canaries among theirselves to be your only conversation partners, letting your yard go to weeds then woods, plus later living on the wrong side of the law … well, for then and there, it did seem pretty do-funny. Not, I admit, a safety pin through the nose—but every age has got its own pet form of weirdness, honey.
    There’s styles in madness too.
2
    HOW DID locals know that Mrs. Smythe’s pretty son had been shot dead? They heard the lady’s sounds, they saw her rolling around in the front yard’s high weeds. The poor postman stood outside Winona’s garden gate. He was just watching. Since telegraph lines were down, it’d fallen to this fellow—delivering the city limits’ worst possible news. Such letters from General Headquarters/Richmond came in black-edged envelopes. You were at least spared the suspense of wondering what was
in
yours.
    First the postman rung a corroded bell on the widow’s rusted gate. Honeysuckle had already heaved her cast-iron fence ten inches off the ground. For the longest time, no answer—only canaries’ scared cheeping from the glassed porch. Finally she did stomp out, but like interrupted from doing something pretty doggone big-time. The postman was holding out a fat letter, afraid to step onto the wooded lot. “I am,” he said, “so sorry to be the one. It’s this. One of these.”
    Living isolated like she did, the widow wouldn’t of known what a black-rimmed envelope meant. Mrs. Smythe was a squat mug-shaped woman with a man’s face but a baby’s shoe size