Oldest Living Confederate Really Tells All

E.M. Forster shows the gap between an anecdote and a story by telling one of each.

Anecdote: “The King died and the Queen died.”

Story: “The King died and the Queen died of grief.”

Two added words. One of them the merest technocratic preposition. And yet those monosyllables provide motive, history, pathos, and the greatest of subjects: life and its limits, love and its limits. Two words, words that only connect.

“Anecdote” might seem the larval stage of “Story.” But, in fact, certain anecdotes cannot be dressed up and taught the forks. With these, the annals of the outtake must abound.

I tried to build my novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, only of stories, pure protein, no filler, no cornstarch, no MSG anecdotage anywhere in the book. I figured if Forster could, with two words, transform journalistic fact into narrative motion, motive and emotion, why shouldn’t my novel’s every fillip and furbelow evoke a larger question, a set of complications worthy of its own short novel?

The work’s 719 pages, its forty main characters, fountain forth with stories earned and invented and saved. “Myth,” the work’s epigraph runs, “is gossip grown old.” Lucy Marsden, our hostess and widow in question, repeats with authority her husband’s gory lore from the War Betwixt the States (though she herself was not born till 1885). Lucy has, over time and via time, become her missing loved one’s living archives. “Stories,” she says, “only happen to people who can tell them.” She clearly means herself. She never mentions Anecdote, a subspecies of epic narrative that Lucille fails to respect or even quite notice.

I worked hard at helping the following example pass from its own translucent fetal anecdotage toward some shaggy rangy independent Storyhood. There’s a reason it refused: This recorded event is merely and literally true. For me, that constitutes a stubborn limitation. You find that Life has put a lien on certain material, however good. You know how some seashells look exquisite at the shore but fade to lumpen grayness even in the beachfront parking lot. And certain details — too local, too often retold — will just not budge beyond their native turf. The following anecdote, so vivid in my life, hated travel, would not — despite my coaxing, my compliments, my bullying — even pack an overnight bag, never really made it past the porch.

During the Spanish-American War, this incident befell a certain plucky young Private Thomas Alfred Morris, my maternal grandfather. Maybe I felt overattached to the literal truth. Maybe that impeded my noticing or inventing a further metaphoric life, a larger use. Something prevented the premise from evolving a luxuriant middle, then a startling if inevitable end. The literal episode had, during fond family retellings, grown so layered and rich. It concerned a tight-lipped fellow who rarely confessed his own mistakes, a man who — as a civilian husband decades later — never once saw fit to cook again. A yearning toward Mythic meaning is heard, I think, in Lucy’s voice at the end of the short passage; this plainly mirrors my own attempt to push a real-life fragment toward some imaginative wholeness that it simply will not bear.

For me, autobiographical fiction often smacks of Forster’s flat first example. In seeking to honor literal and gorgeous inherited details, I feel corseted and staid. It’s more fun to begin with nothing, or a mood’s coloration, some scrap garnered from dreams or skilled eavesdropping; it’s more fun to furnish and construct an event from the ground up, chair by wallpaper by drawer pull by facial tic by sidestreet weather. Those writers whose every work of fiction is thinly veiled memoir have both my pity and my respect. For me, the great inward delight and outrushing adrenaline of writing still springs from free-fall invention — “If this is true then that might be, and if that is. . . .” We all know what total license still bobbles in the wake of that grandest phrase, “Once upon a time. . . .” My novel’s heroine is Once Upon a Time’s options and drawbacks embodied. She could, half-blind, ninety-nine years old, make partial sense of everything, she could make myth of most lived deeds — most all except my literal granddad’s literal and endearing wartime mistake.

So, this good-enough looking passage never survived that crucial transubstantiation. It never “took,” the way a transplanted heart must, to live anew in that superior body where two words, “of grief’ — award humanity — even to a king and a queen, otherwise unknown and unloved.

Here then is a nugget that remains so literally true it never felt the need to leap beyond being a homebody Anecdote and on toward the motion of emotion, on toward that highly mortal immortality we call Story.

 

Sometimes we’d get a stubborn batch of State University history majors visiting the house. They’d come to see my old man — the last vet to live or breathe on either side of that old moldy war. They wouldn’t leave without my husband, bearded and in bed, telling them at least one. At least one war one.

“You ain’t concentrating,” I’d scold my Willie, sounding stern but just to get his attention, don’t you know. “Think back. Maybe do ‘The Soldier That Loved His Wife Too Much’? Or ‘The Death of the Harpsichord.’ Or ‘When the Colors Switched.’ What’s shortest? Look, I know — do your ‘Rice’ one, darling. Listen up. These people ain’t clearing out till you say something. Study my mouth, honey. ‘Rice.’ I say ‘Rrrice.’” Well, he finally whispered the word. A dozen pencils scribbled that down. And for this, folks get Doctor Degrees!

Finally I spied some old mischief flare back of my man’s cataracted eyeballs. Captain toyed with bedclothes, he stared at his own mint hands, he acted shy as a child made to do elocution lessons for company come clear from New York City. Then, slow, out it came in dribs and drabs till it steadied into meaning something.

Was eighteen and sixty four, said he. Seems like the company cook was doling out corn-on-the-cob, saying, “One for you, and one for you, and one. . .” Cook was a large overaverage friendly fellow, he called the troops “my boys,” he just loved to see them eat. This same cook falls backward. He looks embarrassed like somebody’s complained about his grub, he still clutches the tongs.

— See, the poor man’d been shot betwixt the eyes by a sniper and, still in his apron, laying there, mackerel-dead already. Others dodge to cover, quick. They lug that pot of corn — still scalding — to a nearby grove. Somebody brings the tongs. Though feeling sad, soldiers eventually chow down anyway. — People always do. The worse things get, the more your next meal means.

My Willie, a Reb private, he’d not yet gone fourteen. He was made the new chef. That boy knew nothing about cooking except the expert eating of it. Will was a sum total of cowlicks, sunburn, homesickness, excess wrists and ankles. Feeding one hundred men scared him. He recalled his mother’s grand dinner parties prepared by expert house slaves who really suffered over company’s coming, who endured his mother’s fingerbowl fussiness. Young Will now stood off to one side, fretting.

A nice lieutenant stepped over and hinted as how rice might be a good start, plus real easy to do, rice. So, after the others marched out of camp, young Marsden found hisself a twenty-pound sack in the rations wagon. With all that dry rice, he filled a ten-gallon iron pot to its very lip. Willie Marsden then dumped in many a tin cup of water, he lit the fire under its tripod, said, “That’s that” (or something like it — his exact words have been blotted out by time, and frankly, worse things’ve happened, child). Willie wandered off to gather kindling.

When the boy dragged back, a big group stood being rowdy all round the fire. Wee Willie Marsden pressed forward, arms piled with wood. Supper won’t seriously started yet but, off in the woods, he’d begun feeling like he might have some hidden cooking talent. (Imagine someday baking scones for Lee!) It sure hurts a boy’s feelings to see other fellows bunch — cackling — at your first night’s cookfire.

Great gobs and hunks and pounds of rice were pouring over flames. Behaving like lava nearabout, wet rice nuzzled close to men’s boots, this whole tide of it now moved downhill, steaming, pushing along every twig and smallish rock. A tin ladle was borne along upon uncurling white goo. The pot and tripod were so sticky, they hid under the gunk like . . . well, maybe a snowman made of wallpaper paste or something, maybe. This part, I made up just now.

Men laughed, “Some cook, Marsden.” Soldiers thanked the Almighty that their last dedicated chef hadn’t lived to see this type of mess. At first, Marsden frowned and turned away, arms still heaped with sticks. Then somebody decent clapped him on the back, told my Willie to cheer up — he’d get it right someday.

“Well . . .,” the boy commenced shy grinning. “I didn’t know. — How do you people always know stuff?”

One red-haired company clown ran around in front of the advancing mush. He laid down before it — pretending that his hands and feet were hogtied. Squirming like a virgin roped to train tracks, he squealed, “I’ll do as you wish, sir. Just please, don’t get any ON me! “ Everybody considered this as funny as the world ever managed being. When some rice did smudge onto the funny man’s hair, when he grew honestly peeved at this, then soldiers really slapped their knees. — All these months of being sure you’d die the next day, next minute — that strain switched so fast into laughing till you cried. Felt just excellent to.

Well, rice jokes became a type of fad. Caught on, they did. Some wag would say, “Just think, pals, the Chinese invented warfare’s two wickedest weapons: gunpowder and rice.” Then the yuks and hollering’d start.

A few campaigns later, some corporal was chef. But young Private Marsden, pinned down during heavy fire, might hear another Southerner call, “Quick, boy, Mr. Yankee’s gaining on us — boil the secret weapon, fast. Rice for everybody. Wash them back to Maryland!” And — from all them holes and ruts where soldiers hid like security-minded rodents, much chuckling rocked toward the safe civilian sky. Over rifle reports, laughing’d lift. Cannon blasts made trees shiver sideways, whole meadows get Swiss-cheesed with craters, but one hundred men in mud stayed busy with low-grade giggles that lasted and lasted. Rice jokes made about as much sense as anything else out there — more.

After Surrender, rice never seemed as funny to my old man. He could only grin over how hard they’d all turned it into something extra, something else and something fine. “Strange,” he told me back in the days when he could still remark a story, not just tell it, “That was the best twenty pounds our side ever spent. The goodness we wrung out of that one sack! Sometimes, mistakes are the finest things that’ll ever happen to you — you know, Lucy?”

“I sure hope so,” says I, casting a thought back over one shoulder at my life, so-called.

And so his tale is done. But students still stand around watching. I hold Cap’s hand, I grab it a little harder. My man’s glaze-fronted eyes are watering with joy recalled. “Just goes to show you,” he says and then — shaking his whole head and whole beard to one side — you can see him slipping back into fog — his usual home and foxhole. I yet clutch his paw but can feel how even his grip . . . loses . . . its . . . way.

“That’s all, folks,” I tell young history-minded strangers back of me. One boy says he’s still hoping to hear a Robert E. Lee one. Claims my husband told the best of his Lee ones to a group flown down from Harvard College not six months back. “The Captain here, he actually saw Lee, or so one hears,” this lad thinks to inform me, wife of Mount Rushmore here.

“That’s right, darling. — But six months is a while ago for a man my Captain’s age and, believe me, he’s not holding out on you a-purpose. Rice’ll have to do for you today, thank you. This ain’t a jukebox we got going here. Thanks for coming.” Grumbling, out they file, not sure what rice has to do with the winning of a war. Off they wander, mumblish, studying their notes.

“Just goes to show you,” my husband had ended. But Captain never explained exactly what them rice jokes showed. — Maybe how what’s funny gets people through! Maybe the merciful way what’s pathetic sometimes strikes you as nearabout hilarious and saves the day? I don’t know yet.

That part, child, I’m still working on.

 

See? “The King died and the Queen died.” So what?

Therefore, cut it.