Read Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All Online
Authors: Allan Gurganus
Tags: #General Fiction
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (139 page)
“Yes, ma’am, the whole burned part grew back greener.” Bill is ordering another round for us, a gent. “Maybe charcoal helps trees come up stronger? I’ve got a brother-in-law in wood technology at Georgia Tech, should ask him. But, yeah, that’s what you found, ma’am. And on your first time up.”
He retrieves his
Business
. Grateful for this hand you let me squeeze unmercifully just now, I am—like always—glad to know. But spooked some. Maybe it’s the free drink or could be the danger of getting this high up and playing like I’m owed this, which I’m not. A while back, we felt how this plane worked to leave the dirt—this plane
prefers
the ground, makes sense. I don’t know what I’m feeling here but maybe it’s just: thrilled. Going to fetch a plaque for Louisa, or maybe even a silver loving cup, which would be more useful probably. And then you coming along, and my getting treated like Somebody by strangers and then to look down on this wonder of Nature over combat. Will I embarrass you? my forehead pressed here to cold plastic?
Fresh green is teaching me something. This burn rambles clear from Virginia past our hometown to Atlanta. What a beautiful map of a scar! Educational—a bitter, optimistic green. I recognize it. Up under my ribs, a sweet unlatching starts, a tallying. I stare down at that tint changed by hurt. Recovery has upgraded everything that blossomed after. I know scorched-earth policy. And I know about continuing, child. But I never knew that keeping on could, from this high, just
look
so pretty.
Colors
are
the deeds and sufferings of light. Fact. The fact is fair. People recover. Ain’t it something, what folks can spring back from?
Today I feel right wonderful myself. I’m thinking fond thoughts of my husband and my children, child. To be riding our Southern sky, with me strapped up here in a seat belt I secretly invented, to be getting gently half plastered on a second free drink supplied me by a friendly moral man, to be going to harvest prizes my kids earned—oh, it’s a day. And that a young friend such as you would take off work, and use vacation time just to shove my wheelchair on and off this silver rocket, well, it’s more than anybody should expect, ever.
You’d think that all along I really
had
been college material! You’d think I was Mrs. Gotrocks, somebody you’d ask for more than street directions or her shortbread recipe.
I see that path down there, refined. Again I feel this wild ambition stoke up in me. I
want
to. What? Anything, darling. Everything. I have seen so
much and have someway been left alive to tell. I ain’t told all, but most—well,
some
. Now I need to hear
your
all. Start from birth and go till now. First though, let my eyes stray back to that color yonder, as self-made as me. I
am
listening. I know how. Before I shush, one last thing needs saying. I want to speak a fact that Green just taught me. I’ve long waited to know this. I got to say it now out loud to make it so. I’m mighty mighty glad to have you helping, listening. It’s just this.
Nobody could stop me.
Several tried.
I am still here.
At last, I get to say down towards our world, “The war is over.”
ALLAN GURGANUS
Allan Gurganus lives in a small town in North Carolina. His honors include the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
A
LLAN
G
URGANUS
OLDEST LIVING CONFEDERATE WIDOW TELLS ALL
Lucy married at the turn of the last century, when she was fifteen and Colonel William Marsden was fifty. If he was a “veteran of the War for Southern Independence,” Lucy became a “veteran of the veteran” with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Lucy’s story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator’s daily battles in the Home—complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy striper.
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
is proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-72663-7
PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS
With great narrative inventiveness and emotional amplitude, Allan Gurganus gives us artistic Manhattan in the wild 1980s, where young artists—refugees from the middle class—hurl themselves into playful work and serious fun. Our guide is Hartley Mims Jr., a Southerner whose native knack for happiness might thwart his literary ambitions. Through his eyes we encounter the composer Robert Christian Gustafson, an Iowa preacher’s son whose good-looks constitute both a mythic draw and a major limitation, and Angelina “Alabama” Byrnes, a failed deb, five feet tall but bristling with outsized talent. These friends shelter each other, promote each other’s work, and compete erotically. When tragedy strikes, this trio grows up fast, somehow founding, at the worst of times, the truest sort of family.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70203-7
THE PRACTICAL HEART
In his fictional town of Falls, North Carolina—a watchful zone of stifling mores—Allan Gurganus’s fond and comical characters risk everything to protect their improbable hopes from prejudice, poverty, and betrayal. Muriel Fraser, a poor Scottish-born spinster, is the subject of a John Singer Sargent portrait in the imagination of her devoted great-nephew. Tad Worth, a young man dying of AIDS, finds ways to restore vitality to old friends and eighteenth-century houses. Overnight, one pillar of the community, accused of child molesting, becomes the village pariah. And Clyde Delman, ugliest if kindest man in Falls, finds the love of his eight-year-old son jeopardized when troubling family secrets arise. In each of these splendid complex tales, Allan Gurganus wrings truths—sometimes bruising, ofttimes warming—from human hearts as immense as they are local.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-72763-4
WHITE PEOPLE
In these eleven stories, Allan Gurganus gives heartbreaking and hilarious voice to the fears, desires and triumphs of a grand cast of Americans. Here are war heroes bewildered by the complex negotiations of family life, former debutantes called upon to muster resources they never knew they had, senior citizens startled by their own bravery, and married men brought up short by the marvelous possibilities of entirely different lives. Written with flair, wit, and deep humanity, this award-winning volume confirms Allan Gurganus as one of the finest writers of our time.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70427-7
VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, OCTOBER 2001
Copyright
©
1984, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1989 by Allan Gurganus
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1989.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Earlier versions of chapters from this work have been published by the following: “How to Leave” in
Antaeus
, “A Body Tends to Shine” in
The Paris Review
, “The Tailor and the Leg” in
Southwest Review
, “Fight Song” in
The North American Review
, “The Passable Kingdom” in MSS, “Love at 99” (“One Old Man in Here I Like”) in
The Leader
, and two separate portions from “How to Return,” one as “Under This Very Mall” in
Harper’s
and the other as part of “Garden Sermon,” an essay concerning the novel’s historical sources, in
The Iowa Review
. “Good Help” was originally published as a chapbook by the North Carolina Wesleyan Press in a signed edition of 1,000 illustrated by the author; twenty-six alphabetized copies were accompanied by original drawings.
I appreciate the editors’ early and abiding encouragement.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Gurganus, Allan
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All/ Allan Gurganus—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76411-9
I. Title
PS3557.U814 O4 1989
v3.0
