War Brides

GRAINGER COUNTY, Tenn. — They know what’s comin’, these last two known Civil War widows. People wantin’ to know about that war.

“Lawd, huh-nee,” says Alberta Martin, 92, who is recognized as the only living widow of a Confederate veteran. She lives in Elba, Ala., where fans send her the purr-tiest flowers you ever laid your eyes on. “Ah tole so many tales ‘n’ things, ah’m about to tell ‘em all out.”

Deep in the southern Tennessee woods, the woman known as the last Union widow awakens at the sound of a visitor.

“Laww-dy,” says 89-year-old Gertrude Grubb Janeway, from her bed in a simple log cabin. A visitor from California. Who flew on an airplane. To ask about that war.

“They had never asked no questions ‘til here lately,” she says, shaking her head.

Lately, though. Lordy.

Such is the ageless reach of the Civil War that even its widows’ words are part of the legacy. Now the words of the last two, according to Civil War heritage groups, portend a finality, the fading oral history of a time that defined this nation.

Otherwise, history fumbles for cliches to explain the passions of the war--brother against brother, father against son--but no words will ever nail it. The numbers alone confound: From 1861 to ‘65, more than 620,000 men died in America’s deadliest war ever; by comparison, 58,000 U.S. troops died in the Vietnam War.

With each widow, only wisps of their husbands’ war stories emerge, like bits of cotton fluttering in the wind. As very young women, each had married an old ex-soldier in 1927--as fate would have it, one Confederate, one Union. These days, at Civil War events, the Confederate widow works a room with aplomb; the Union widow stays home.

Here are their stories:

*

The horse got slapped on the rump and then trotted home alone. The grist mill would wait.

That morning, in May 1864, a gang of menfolk had stopped the rider and looked him up and down. How old are you? someone asked. Seventeen, John Janeway said. You look big and stout, another rider said. Turns out that Janeway had run into the Union Army’s 14th Illinois Cavalry, passing through rebel territory on its way to meet Gen. William T. Sherman’s troops near Atlanta.

How ‘bout you gettin’ up behind me and ridin’ with us, one Union soldier asked. He did and gave his name as John January to throw his kinfolk off. They would figure he went off to war and come looking for him.

His horse made it back to the family farm, three miles yonder, a bushel of corn still strapped to its back. . . .

Good horse, Mrs. Janeway murmurs.

She had stopped her husband there, when he told the war story. Back then, in 1927, she was a bride of 18, and John Janeway was 80, but still she thought: His poor mamma and daddy!

“I said, ‘Lord, have mercy! Weren’t they scared to death, ‘fraid you mighta fell off and got hurt?’ He didn’t say were they scared or not, but said his daddy said [later], ‘Well, it’ll make a man out of him.’ ”

On this afternoon, a soft rain mists the tin roof of her 25-by-25-foot cabin, off an unmarked country lane. In bed, with a pink ribbon pinned in her gray hair, Mrs. Janeway drifts in and out of the story of her first and only love. Her face crinkles with joy when she talks about her husband, who died in 1937. He is buried a few miles away on a hillside of red-clay earth, a gaze away from the Great Smoky Mountains. The government-issued tombstone says: John January. She still gets his $70 monthly pension check from the Veterans Administration, in the name of John January.

From his grave, you can see a road dipping into a blooming valley--this is the road that Janeway took on the way to the grist mill 135 years ago. The mill is still there.

Not much changes in these parts, outside Chattanooga. Mrs. Janeway didn’t get electricity until the early ‘80s, at the insistence of her nephew, Duel Grubb. She has never had running water or plumbing. Her cabin cocoons a past of kerosene lamps, a wood-burning stove, a Victrola with a crocheted dust cover.

In bad health, Mrs. Janeway has not left the house since a ’92 trip to the doctor’s office by ambulance. She no longer leaves her bed and gets by with part-time caregivers who pump water for her from a well. Family and neighbors drop by to check on Mrs. Janeway, who lives alone, and so do strangers asking about the war.

She is stuck on the question of why her husband fought. Maybe he ran off to escape from country life, where the craziest thing he knew was that the nearby Tennessee River runs north. Tennessee was a Confederate state, and maybe that bothered him, though no one around him owned slaves.

“Well,” Mrs. Janeway says, “all I know is that he freed the darkies. There are two sides of it, you know. One to hold ‘em, and one to free ‘em, and I’m so glad he was on the freein’ side because he didn’t want to hurt nobody that way, would he?”

Her connection to the war broke off with her husband’s death. She had no children but tended to an old milk cow and a barn for farmers who grew tobacco on her land. Until 1985, when old age crept up, she would walk 14 miles to and from church each Sunday. Nothing better than the church’s family reunions, with all-day preachin’ and singin’ and tables of Sunday-best food. Never had any idea that Civil War groups might come calling.

For two years, a Tennessee chapter of the Daughters of Union Veterans had searched for her. They got wind that a Union widow was still alive but didn’t know where. They were looking for a widow named January.

Last year, they found her. Her nephew wasn’t sure what to think. His aunt was not up to meeting people. But maybe the group could help. His aunt’s federal home care aid had been cut, and Duel Grubb had picked up the tab.

On her birthday weekend, in July 1998, a few members visited with flowers and a store-bought cake, Mrs. Janeway’s first. The group promised to raise money for her and try to hike her federal aid. Meanwhile, Duel Grubb turns down requests from writers for interviews, officials who want to give her plaques and a friend of the last Confederate widow who wants to arrange a meeting.

“At this point, what’s it going to do for her?” Duel Grubb says. “She doesn’t need that.”

She asks for nothing, her nephew says, except for a little vanilla ice cream and chewing tobacco now and again. Her weakness for tobacco started at age 7, a pinch of vice for a girl who helped raise a family.

As a young girl, she usually stayed home from school to watch three little brothers while her mamma worked. Her mamma, a widow, washed clothes for 50 cents a load or some milk or cornmeal.

One day, Mr. Janeway dropped by to see her mamma, an old friend. He had lived out West for a while and, in the late ‘20s, moved back home to see his folks. He had his eye on his old friend’s teenage daughter, and the two would talk and talk.

“He came to see mamma,” Mrs. Janeway says, her blue eyes bright with delight, “and I got him.”

What did she love about him?

“Well, I loved him all over,” she cackles. “Is that what you asked?”

Uh, not really. But what about the war?

Ten years of marriage, and she never could coax war stories out of him much. He told her about how he enlisted, and how he almost got shot once, probably in Atlanta.

“One time, he laid down to go to sleep, and a bullet come in behind him,” she says.

That’s about all she remembers, and she will rest now, thank you.

All she needs is within a turn of her head. A picture of his grave is taped on the wall. Another picture shows the couple: a white-haired man with a cane in his lap, and a pretty, slim girl with a serious expression.

They never fought.

“He never did scold me,” Mrs. Janeway says. “We never did have no fussin’.”

She was at his bedside in their log cabin when he died of typhoid fever, and held his hand until he dropped hers.