Varina

  They first went to New Orleans and stayed a couple or three weeks resting in their new freedom, breathing deep breaths, visiting old broke friends like General Wheeler, who had found work in a hardware store selling nails and nuts and bolts—the opposite trajectory to vile little Miles at Fortress Monroe who had risen from shop clerk to general.

  The city retained its shabby beauty—spared the destruction of Atlanta and Columbia because it had fallen to the Federals early in the war. Bureaucrats and army still swarmed in great numbers, intent on reshaping New Orleans in the image of their beloved northern cities. Some days—though still beautiful—New Orleans felt like a corpse and other days like a ghost.

  Every morning they walked through the French Quarter, enjoying Deep South December weather, stopping to drink strong black coffee at a place with outdoor tables and bougainvillea blooming rich against a south-facing wall—every day telling each other chapters of their stories since being parted on the Clyde at Old Point Comfort. Burton said, That first part—a very bad time.

  He told her how they’d taken him up the Potomac to Old Capital Prison and then Fort McNair within sight of the Capitol dome. The Lincoln assassination conspirators faced trial there, and the Federals attempted to bribe and coerce Burton into confessing to having a part in the conspiracy. They offered him total clemency if he would testify that Jeff had been in contact with Booth and the others. The Federals even marched him into the courtroom to watch some of the trial and conviction of Atzerodt, Powell, Herold, and Mary Surratt.

  At one point Burton found himself in a room with Surratt’s daughter, Anna. The Federals hoped the two might say something incriminating to each other. Burton described Anna as handsome and pitiful and terrified. She wore a white bandage around her forehead from having collapsed on the steps of the White House after President Johnson refused to listen even for a minute to her pleas not to hang her mother. Burton said Anna’s face looked like it belonged on a Roman coin and that her eyes welled with tears the entire time he sat with her. An older woman, clearly meant to provoke information, asked them leading questions for hours as if they knew each other, but Anna was too stunned to speak and Burton was too smart.

  Burton said he didn’t see the simultaneous hangings, but he heard everything from his cell—the constant clatter of lumber and hammering for two or three days as the big four-person scaffold rose, and then on that hot day a murmuring crowd and solemn voices, a deep silence in the cells. Then a loud crack as all four traps opened at the same time. Next day, right in the middle of the path he usually walked in his few minutes of sunshine, a row of new graves spaced like beads on a string. He said the words twice—beads on a string.

  Burton told how hard the Federals kept trying to hang him too before finally giving up—not so much convinced of his innocence as of the weakness of their evidence. They moved him to Fort Delaware, where he was the only prisoner in the big lopsided, star-shaped fort on Pea Patch Island that had once held ten thousand.

  AFTER FIFTEEN DAYS OF REST and rich New Orleans food, Burton looked less gaunt and ghostly. They caught a steamboat upriver, stopping in Natchez with plans to stay awhile. But once settled into a modest hotel V realized no one she wanted to see in her hometown remained. She didn’t want to go out to the graveyard and ponder Winchester’s marker—he wasn’t there. He was in her heart and her head every day. At The Briers she enjoyed the river view, but there was nothing else for her. So she and Burton rested and read for a few days, and then moved on toward Davis Bend to discover whether anything of value had been left after the Federal sacking.

  In letters to friends posted during their journey, V settled on a formula to describe Burton, calling him all in the world to me. Why not? He had sacrificed so much for V and Jeff, and his loyalty had cost him his youth.

  THE BIG MANSION AT THE HURRICANE wasn’t even a picturesque ruin of a plantation house. V walked the perimeter and found heaps of rubble, foundation bricks, a few burned stubs of great columns. The hole of the basement opened to the sky, and she looked down onto massive crazed timbers and dunes of gray ashes. She thought she saw a long, curved metal handle that might have worked the pump to raise water three stories high to flush Old Joe’s amazing toilets.

  Joseph was pathetic, diminished, ruined. He lived in a bedroom of the guesthouse and would have seemed pitiful to any humanitarian who hadn’t suffered under his personality since seventeen as V had. She gave him a nice robe she had bought in New Orleans, and the old bastard looked so low and broken that she added four hundred dollars cash to the gift—money she didn’t really have to spare. Men often age pathetic that way, even the meanest of them. Old toothless lions that once bit your hand off begin wanting a pat on the head.

  Joseph wasn’t even the owner anymore. He had sold Davis Bend—The Hurricane and Brierfield both—to Benjamin Montgomery, the man who’d picked V up at the dock on her first visit. Payments of $18,000 a year, a portion of which would go to Jeff. All V could think was that she hadn’t been allowed to communicate much more to her husband than that she and the children missed him and loved him, but Jeff and Joseph had managed to negotiate the sale of an enormous ruined plantation to their former slaves.

  AT DINNER THAT FIRST NIGHT, Joseph sat at one end of the table and Ben sat at the other. Ben still wore his goatee, now threaded with white, and his green eyes still gave nothing away, his face a perfect mask.

  Ben’s two daughters—very excited—told V all about going to Oberlin College the next year, asking for her advice on the classes they should take, their wardrobes. They treated Joseph like a beloved hoary grandfather and kept asking if he needed anything, kept checking to see if he was eating enough. More biscuits, Mr. Davis? Another spoonful of brown gravy on your potatoes? You’re getting too skinny—eat another piece of cake. The girls were nearly the age V was when she first fell off the boat from Natchez naive as could be.

  Strange as it seemed, it all made sense. Essentially, Benjamin had been running the whole place for years—keeping the books, writing most of the correspondence, managing Brierfield too after Pemberton died—so it wasn’t a great stretch in terms of logic for him to become owner. It was a great stretch when it came to history, though.

  End of the evening, Benjamin said to V, I hope this new arrangement isn’t distressing to you.

  —No, it isn’t. Do you remember the first time we met?

  —Yes, but I didn’t expect you would.

  —That day, riding in from the river, could either of us have imagined tonight?

  —I could have. Or something like it.

  V AND BURTON RODE OUT to Brierfield very sedately in a two-wheeled gig. As soon as they came in sight of the house, Burton pulled back the horse. Across the horizontal white boards of the front gable, someone had swiped big red words with a paintbrush—THE HOUSE THAT JEFF BUILT. They’d been warned that the place was intact but had been looted to emptiness by Federal troops before being used as a school by the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. But V had to see for herself.

  They sat and looked, and then Burton said, Do you have memories? Does this make you sad?

  —I never want to see a picturesque plantation house again.

  On the way back to The Hurricane, she told Burton how Benjamin had invented an effective shallow-water propeller for riverboats and had tried to patent it before the war, but the Federal government denied his claim because as a slave he was not legally a citizen of the United States. So Joseph and Jeff tried to patent it for him in their names, but that didn’t work because, obviously, they hadn’t invented the device, since the patent office already had Ben’s drawings and descriptions and whatever else a patent application required. She’d asked Ben about it after dinner, and he said that immediately following the war when he and all the other freed people had become citizens, he applied again to the federal patent office, and again the answer was nope—without even a reason given.

  FOR OLD TIMES’ SAKE, maybe, Ben drove V and Burton to t
he dock himself. Before they boarded he said to V, My son, Isaiah, and I want to make a place for free black people here on Davis Bend. A community. Come back and see how we’re doing sometime.

  —If I ever pass this way again I certainly will. And please ask your girls to write and tell me about their college adventures.

  V paused and then said, I’m reminded of a young man I knew not long ago—a phrase he used. New world coming.

  —Yes it is, Ben said.

  V AND BURTON HEADED UPRIVER planning to make a big, leisurely northeast curve with plenty of stops along the way—Memphis and then Cairo and onto the Ohio River and eventually by railway to New York City. Between the Bend and Memphis, they enjoyed a stretch of perfect, warm winter weather—blue days, yellow sunsets, deep crisp nights of air so dry and clear that the bowl of sky filled with stars. V lacked optimism for a future, so one afternoon she suggested to Burton that since they were together on the wide Mississippi—no guarantees such a moment would ever happen again—they should go on and fulfill their promise to each other early. Wine, water, sunset.

  Burton, surprised and a little embarrassed, said, I feel a century older than that boy.

  —Let’s call it a celebration. We’ve survived to see what happens next, even if it’s grim.

  So after an early dinner in the salon—sun setting over the water in colors of gold and silver, brass and iron—V and Burton found chairs on the hurricane deck above the bow. A lone kite glided over—scissoring its forked tail, banking and pitching as it swooped close by the pilothouse. A dense flight of swallows formed shapes against the sky like a child molding a dough ball, never quite creating a convincing box turtle or dog’s head or teapot, but still moving from idea to idea with beautiful fluidity.

  V and Burton sat long through the evening with two bottles of fairly good Bordeaux dated before the war, scavenged by the captain from a private stock he’d stored cool below the waterline. They touched glasses in unspoken toasts to avoiding disaster that day and then they dinged spoken toasts to lifelong friendship.

  Down toward the bottom of the second bottle—both of them laughing, shawled in blankets—V raised a glass proposing words she wanted Burton to say at her funeral. She said, I’ve been working on it, and I’ll keep refining it over time, but write this down for now—Had I been consulted about the cosmos, I should have criticized its parts with great vigor and complained about the result, in fact I—as at present informed—should have resisted imposing Adam’s society upon Eve as an infliction of boredom not justified by a paternal government.

  —Really? Burton said. That’s what you want at your funeral?

  —Think of it as a closing argument. At least it will get a laugh from Mary Chesnut.

  A couple of weeks later when they parted in New York, V hugged Burton close and then held him out at arm’s length and said, Till death do us part, yes?

  EVENTUALLY PRESIDENT JOHNSON’S ATTENTION became distracted by his own impeachment trial, and his urgency to hang Jefferson subsided. V was given permission to visit her husband, who had been moved from his cell to a small aboveground room because the doctors thought he might die from the damp casemates. Then after a great deal of lobbying, she received permission to live at the fort, and she and Jeff were given quarters in a house with a narrow bridge from the top floor over to the ramparts, and they could walk the mile circuit of the fort with wide views of the bay and Hampton Roads. Jefferson’s lawyers began to feel a little hope that the Federals lacked the nerve to try him, fearing they would lose their case and be forced to free a vindicated Jefferson Davis on the world.

  EASED FROM DREADING THE WORST by having it mostly happen, V tried out the idea that she was still theoretically youngish in body and mind. She started going out to the beach at Old Point Comfort at dawn and swimming with the young wife of an officer. When they made it a distance offshore and turned to start back, the huge black cannon barrels of the water battery loomed like a cresting wave. Sometimes when she wanted to swim or to walk beyond the walls and the shopkeeper General Miles tried to stop her, she’d remind him that she was not his prisoner. He agreed he couldn’t legally make her stay inside the walls but suggested that if she needed total freedom she might find rooms with the whores in Norfolk, since she already knew a couple of them intimately. Otherwise, she should remember he had the power to have her stripped to the skin and searched again for any reason—including his own amusement—every time she came and went.

  —The newspapers will love that story, she said.

  LATE AFTERNOONS she walked down the sand past shiny black devil’s purses, beached jellyfish, sandpipers dashing at the waterline, black-headed gulls standing solemn as deacons, and brown pelicans skimming the water to fill their pouches with little fish. Before sunset, the sky domed soft and blue or flat and gray, and ospreys hovered high, bracing still as hummingbirds against the sea breeze and then plunging, wings tucked, into the water for menhaden and spot. She watched the ospreys so often and so long she realized they usually shifted the fish in their talons to carry them headfirst as they flew away. Always the hiss of low bay waves on sand and the shells of horseshoe crabs like empty helmets.

  One particular sunset, a few folks from the town gathered on the beach to fry oysters dredged in cornmeal in a big iron skillet of bacon grease over a beach fire. Men shucked the oysters and threw the shells into a pile, and a woman patted the oysters into a trencher of cornmeal and slipped them into the grease. A few older people sat on three-legged stools and the rest on old patchwork quilts spread over the sand.

  They invited V to sit and then continued their conversation. One man told how strong his garden had come in and how sad it was to watch the unpicked excess tomatoes fall from the vine.

  A woman said, And yet you never give anybody produce other than squash as big as your arm and soft as a sponge. I’d welcome a basket of fresh tomatoes anytime.

  The gardener said, Doesn’t matter what you do, people complain.

  One of the younger women eventually said to V, You’re one of the women that has her man locked up in there?

  —Yes, V said. A year now.

  —Buried under those thick walls?

  —He was by himself beneath the casemates for a long time and got sick. But they finally let me take care of him and now we have three rooms of a house.

  —Not as bad, then?

  —Much better.

  An old man with salt-and-pepper hair gone far back at the temples shifted tone and told a story about courting a girl long ago, how he tried to impress her with his horse, which was really not much of a horse to impress a girl with. He said it was a five-gaited gelding—walk, trot, canter, fall down, get back up. But the girl married him anyway. Sadly they never got any children, but happily they lived like newlyweds for forty years, walking on the beach together every evening the weather allowed, except during the worst of the war.

  People around the fire said things about how much he must still miss her and how often they remembered her.

  After a pause one of the women said to V, You fish much, ma’am?

  —Well, I’ve always enjoyed watching it done.

  The man with the horse story said, We’ve been trying to be polite, but we know who you are.

  —Yes?

  —I don’t know how to say it any way but one. We all hope they don’t kill your husband.

  —Thank you for that. I hope so too. Down in Savannah the soldiers taught my children to sing a cheerful song about hanging their father.

  —They’ll back down, the woman cooking the oysters said. If they wanted him dead they’d never have let him out from under the fort walls. The dirt is so deep over the casemates you can bury a body there. And besides, why make a rival for their own martyred president on purpose?

  Everyone sat quietly for a long time. Gray twilight rose from the eastern shore like a morphine daze. And then the horse man said, I bet you have plenty of stories to tell.

  —A few, V said.

 
But all she could remember at the moment related to seafood, a spring when she was twenty or so, the run of shad ascending the Potomac at Washington and men on the shore and out in boats setting seines. Lines of huge cork floats held the top ropes of the seines, and fat lead sinkers dragged the bottom to create a wall of netting. At night, oil lanterns fixed to the cork floats cast yellow light in long bands across the dark river. V told them about riding in an open carriage in the soft spring night, probably feeling all plush from some recent social success and a couple of glasses of wine. She watched the fishermen draw the nets and haul shad in by the thousands. The fish struggled, a roil of packed muscular life, their diamond scales flashing in lantern light.

  That recollection did not prove completely satisfying to her audience, so she told the one about her father and the shooting match. She began by saying, Picture a muddle of wealthy ignorant Mississippi gentlemen, drunk and armed with muskets, in a raw patch of new-cleared ground, their horses and slaves shaded at the edge of the woods.

  But now the story that seemed tragic when she was younger had become comic, and she successfully played it for laughs.

  V sat among the storytellers until the colors of sky and sea balanced themselves alike into a single shade of slate, and she questioned if she were over or under the water, over or under the sky. Only the red coals of the cookfire broke the general blue-gray and fixed a point in space.

  The cook spooned more oysters into the hot grease.

  V said, Would you have a dozen of those to spare? I know he would like a few.

  Moments later, V hurried back through the sally port with a napkin bundle of them, hot and greasy, eight to give to Jeff before they went completely cold and two each for the young guards at the gate who appreciated her treats of candy or pastries and welcomed her comings and goings. She always had something for them, even if only a hard peppermint.