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

never see him again, will I? Tell me otherwise. I’ll never get to wash his hair again.—Who asked you in here? Vultures, with their young. You swoop in the one time I’m too pained to stop you. Buzzards! Leeches and their leech babies!”
    The group back-stepped quick over years of
Falls Herald Travelers
. Winona lurched, folks spilled down her brick steps. The committee of girls ran fast but guarded that one hair like it was some single lighted birthday candle. Everybody poured through the garden gate, feeling safer on the street. But Winona didn’t leave her home. You could see her in there releasing all birds from their cages. She slammed her front door. Through porch-glass panes, neighbors saw a black dress now flocked across with beating yellow wings—the fragilest cloak and helmet of real lives. “Make my skin crawl,” somebody said. Somebody else said, “She’d be a novel, but nobody’d believe it.”
    Won’t two full days after the widow drove sympathizers from her yard, she posted a sign announcing that her songbirds were now for sale. (She’d been broke but hadn’t admitted it till knowing her poor Ned was dead.) And it was that very evening, her watchful neighbors—ever vigilant for casserole reasons or new chapters in the not yet written Book of Here—noticed the addition.
    Come morning there it sat in Winona Smythe’s brambled side yard: a gray army tent propped—occupied.
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    I STILL own the letter. Winona willed it to my Captain. I got it next. Chain of command. Its writer was the gent who wondered aloud, would a war be “canary suitable,” who stopped Rebs’ carving up the Yankee sniper. See my bedside table’s top drawer? Sometimes I call it The Archives. Sometimes I call it the top drawer. Fish out that whole musty bundle. You wouldn’t believe what-all’s in there. I’m sure I’d be surprised by half this mess. Look, time’s turned my papers and me as brown as any good Cuba cigar. Here …
    August 19, ’62
    Dear Mrs. Theodore Smythe,
    We sorely regret to inform you that during the early PM of August 12, 18 and 62, your son, Private Ned Smythe, much beloved by his fellows-in-arms, was, in the line of duty, while being elevated to the rank of National Hero, deprived of his young life. The fatal skirmish took place roughly nine miles southeast of Cheatham, Virginia. The commandant (who was some distance from the localeof said incident) has asked me to explain that, at the time of your boy’s death, young Ned had scaled a tree, apparently scouting enemy fortification on the far shore. It was then that Yankee miniés found and ended his valiant young life. He was killed at once, and, insofar as it is possible to tell such things, without apparent pain.
    Though custom dictates that such letters as this inform the bereaved family of how respected and beloved their deceased soldier was, in Ned’s case, the task proves especially easy (and therefore, Mrs. Smythe, most difficult). His beauty of character, of carriage, and of person were remarked upon by all. His trusting genial air and constitutional fineness provided each of us, during fatiguing manoeuvres, with an odd margin of quietude and consolation. His singing voice alone was a gift enjoyed by some of the Confederacy’s highest-ranking officers. The night before he was taken from us, he sang for the men and with a perfect trusting composure that bespoke an admirable and genteel education.
    He leaves behind a friend from your hometown, a boy as yet (these seven days after the shooting) only fitfully able to continue. If you will permit me a personal note in what should perhaps remain a more official communication.
    Not long after one of our early victories, we had reason to encamp at a former mining camp along the Shenandoah Ridge. It had once been devoted to the excavation of either mica or gold. Its building showed the effects of years-previous abandonment. Pleased by this bivouac, both your son and his friend adopted, as boys