Varina

  DESPITE LIVING ALL HER LIFE with the wide brown flow of the Mississippi as the overwhelming geography of her world—the Pikes Peak and Mont Blanc—V had never traveled on a grand riverboat. So as she and Winchester boarded the Magnolia in Natchez, she was fairly overwhelmed by the scale of the thing. The big stern-wheel vessel—all its grinding and ratchety mechanisms of boilers and cranks and struts and gears and wheels and paddles—pulsed with kinetic power.

  V worried about her clothes. Appropriate dress is so easy for men. They mostly want to wear uniforms, so their choices are strict and almost nonexistent. Winchester wore a black suit and a white shirt, and he could have gone to a funeral, a wedding, a baptism, or to testify in a court of law. But V had troubled herself for weeks coming up with a traveling outfit that would place her in the public eye as she wanted to be placed. Slightly more overdressed than underdressed and not looking like a frumpy governess on the way to a first job, but not like a little idiotic curly-haired belle either. She wanted to costume herself for a role that she wasn’t sure existed.

  Her compartment felt glamorous, though it was not. The whole space of her cabin measured six by nine with only enough floor space to stand and change clothes. A louvered door opened onto the outside boiler deck, and a solid door opened into the central salon. Her bunk, braced by metal rods, hung like a shelf from the wall. She turned back a wedge of coverlet to reveal perfectly white linen, but when she mashed her hand down, the mattress was only a thin, dense mat of kapok compressed by the weight of a thousand bodies. A tiny wax-blistered bedside shelf served as nightstand, with a single candle to read by. The energy of the big boat pulsed through the floors and walls and felt dangerous—which it was, given the many hundreds of passengers who had died on the river from boiler explosions.

  AFTER DINNER—served at long tables in the salon—V and Winchester walked circles around the boiler deck and down the stairs to the main deck and all the way up to the hurricane deck where they stood at the rails and watched a muted early December sunset over Louisiana. A crescent moon and a bright planet or two stood in the deep sky above the horizon. She rested a hand on his forearm as they walked, but they couldn’t find a topic for conversation sustainable beyond three exchanges. When the sky went fully dark, Winchester stopped as they passed her door. He said, We need to say good night.

  V said, I thought we might take blankets and sit in the deck chairs and talk until dawn.

  —I’m afraid not tonight, Winchester said.

  —Then what other night?

  —Not this one, dear.

  V’S BAGGAGE HUNCHED ON THE DOCK. She stood at the rail of the Magnolia and looked down at them and was already slightly embarrassed that all her clothes and toiletries and books for the journey fit into only two arch top trunks.

  After the settled, monied beauty of Natchez—pink azaleas and purple bougainvillea and white columns—Davis Landing looked like bleeding-raw nothing, a vast expanse of brown water merged into a viscous mud landscape churned to slop by horses and oxen and wagon wheels. A stub of gray wood dock reached forty feet into the river. The weathered posts rotted half-a-foot deep into the rings of the cut tops, and deck boards curled upward against their nails at both ends like heathens raising their arms in praise of the sun. The riverboat floated self-contained, visiting for a brief moment, whiter and more powerful and more important than the muddy landscape and utterly transient.

  A great many black men hefted large heavy things on and off the boat.

  Winchester already waited on the dock alongside the trunks. Seeing him from the deck, V thought he looked like a preacher standing at the pulpit ready to begin a ceremony.

  She walked down the lowered stage to the dock and stood close beside him. She said, Who gives this girl?

  Winchester shook his head and smiled a grim smile. He looked tired.

  A slim black man—V’s age, wearing creased brown pants and a very white shirt—walked onto the dock and said, Miss Howell?

  —Yes?

  —I’ll take you to Hurricane, miss. Be a while getting there, with the road and all.

  —Just a few moments, V said.

  AS THE UNLOADING AND RELOADING of the boat finished, she and Winchester stood together and looked away from the river into the country. The only visible structure stood at the tree line, a big shed roofed with old silvery shakes. It leaned off plumb, shadowed by tall pines. A sloppy wet one-track road stretched inland and disappeared in a curve between the woods and the shed and a fallow cotton field.

  V said, I thought you were spending a night or two here and then taking a down boat?

  —No, Winchester said. That’s not possible.

  —Of course it’s possible. In fact I understood it was planned.

  —Not possible for me. I’m sorry. I’ll go on up to Vicksburg and find a boat back down to Natchez in a few days.

  Winchester awkwardly kissed her hand. And then he reached his arms around her and held her in a long embrace like a man gripping his own life, trying to keep from being pulled below the opaque surface of the river and dragged to the Gulf by the weight of high muddy water. And then he gripped her shoulders at their bony points and pushed her out to arm’s length and looked her level in the eyes. She and Winchester had become the same height a year before.

  V looked back at him. She noticed a few threads of gray hairs at his temples.

  Winchester said, Don’t.

  He shook his head, as if he had more to say, but he didn’t finish. He kissed her on the forehead and on each cheek and then on the lips. And then he turned and walked up the stage to the boat.

  V watched him until he was gone. Wondering, don’t what?

  Don’t forget to write? Don’t stop reading Homer? Don’t ever forget me? Don’t leave me? The instant passed so fast, and when that happens, it goes for good and all you have is a slow lifetime to speculate on revisions. Except time flows one way and drags us with it no matter how hard we paddle upstream.

  Looking back, how much older was Winchester than the older man she married?

  THE SLIM BLACK MAN SAT in a flatbed wagon waiting—not a carriage but a wagon you might haul hay in. He was handsome and wore a pointed goatee that lengthened his face. His eyes were pale green and distant, a veil between himself and the world. V climbed in and sat on the bench beside the driver while her trunks were loaded. The Magnolia’s big paddle wheel began churning against the current.

  The horses stood sunken in mud to the pasterns, and when the driver slapped the reins they took their first steps with loud sounds of suction.

  When they reached the woods-edge, V said, This is strange territory.

  All the warning the man could give was to turn his head her way and look her a glancing blow and say, Deep in the world round here, miss.

  —Tell me your name, she said.

  —Benjamin Montgomery.

  They rolled past cotton fields and cornfields, ragged and brutalized, the rubble of stems and stalks and branches, all the biologic rot of the off-season. For a while, the driver hummed a weary delta pattern of notes, five of them, over and over.

  V said, Benjamin, is it a nice house, The Hurricane?

  —Better than most.

  —I’ve met Mr. Joseph Davis before, back when I was a girl. But not his wife and children.

  —All young ladies around the place, ma’am—about your same age.

  —Really? And Mrs. Davis?

  —The same too.

  —Mysterious, V said.

  —Ma’am?

  —Mother and daughters all the same age. Unusual at least.

  —They call each other all by their first names without saying Mama and Daddy and Sister.

  —Yes? Like none of them are related?

  Benjamin shrugged his shoulders.

  THEN THE FLURRY OF ARRIVAL, the greetings, all the strangeness of somebody else’s house. The smells of people and food. All the figuring out of your bedroom, your baggage, the delicacy of how they handle chamber pots.
Except that chamber pots didn’t factor because, amazingly, each of the three floors had a toilet flushed with rainwater from a cistern down in the basement and a tank on the roof.

  A strange table that evening—Old Joseph and his gathering of four young women, five counting V. They dined by the dim light of big silver candelabras with half the tapers burned down to useless stubs. Supper was perfunctory, almost a snack. Slices of cold salty ham, a white bowl of boiled potatoes, a small bowl of yesterday’s greens, a cruet of cider vinegar, a straw basket of biscuits, and a small clump of butter slumping on a saucer.

  Eliza, the young wife, said, You’ve come a day before I expected, so tomorrow night will be better. She cracked a smile to reveal tiny white teeth set in very pink gums.

  —This is the third of the month, isn’t it? V said, confused and ready to apologize for her presence.

  —Oh, I wouldn’t know, the wife said. I just expected you a day later than this one is all.

  As Benjamin had said, Joseph’s wife and his eldest daughter and V all looked much the same age. The two other daughters looked to be about thirteen, and both seemed like strange girls exiled to that lonely river bend without strong memories of anywhere else.

  A servant poured alcohol only for Joseph, and he took just the one glass of brown whiskey, though he drank it out of a Champagne coupe poured brimful. He sat among them like their weary grandfather, nearly bald and hollow-cheeked and wealthy and shabby, the dome of his head pinkish gray. Big windows stood full open, and faint sounds of frogs and bugs and reptiles pulsed from the total black night outside. Mosquitoes and moths flew in and out the windows, and some of them immolated themselves in the candle flames, flashing and sizzling like tiny fireworks. The butter-colored plaster walls lay blank, without any blemish of framed art. For long stretches, little conversation occurred—sounds of people chewing and silverware on china.

  At some point, like flinging a baited hook into a fished-out pond, more to test casting skills than in hope of catching something, V said, Mr. Davis, your peninsula of land, your Bend, is an interesting plot of geography.

  —I suppose.

  V cast again, Was it cleared when you arrived or did you hack it out of green wilderness? And, how did you and your girls come to move here from Natchez?

  She expected a boring story of business opportunity, a shrewd real estate purchase, fertile soil, rising cotton prices, maybe something about favorable slave prices way out here in the wilderness.

  But Old Joe clashed his fork down on his plate. The girls around the table looked down at their food.

  He said very hot, What have you heard? Are they still gossiping about me in Natchez?

  —No, sir, V said quickly. Not that I’ve heard.

  After a long silence, Joseph finally answered V’s question about the land. He said, It took a long time, scraping the jungle to bare dirt and burning all the bushes and vines and trees and digging up and burning the stumps to make the land ready for planting cotton.

  Eliza said, I wasn’t here then, but it must have been a challenge for the labor force.

  —How many acres? V asked.

  —Round it to eight thousand, Joseph said. Above all, though, The Hurricane is an experiment. Have you heard of Robert Owen, the Welshman? His famous utopian social philosophies?

  —I know the name and little more, V said. His theme is social justice, isn’t it?

  —One of them. Democratic socialism is the heart of the matter. A few years ago I met him on a long stagecoach ride west out of Pittsburgh. He was on a speaking tour, explaining the utopian community he intended to build in Indiana. He had owned a factory town in Scotland and developed ideas about fairness between capital and labor. Interestingly, the other passenger was Mister Dickens’s illustrator, Cruikshank, and all I remember him saying was how every country’s artists depict Jesus with their own features. Owen and I, though, talked without stop for ten hours, and I’ve since read every word of his writings available on this side of the Atlantic. Very interesting, his notions concerning the relationship between labor and capital. His sense of a utopian manufacturing community of equity and fairness and justice. That day was transformative for me. I’m trying to apply his ideas here.

  The older daughter pushed a little sweet pickle around her plate in boredom, and the younger girls whispered and bumped elbows and smothered laughs based on some derisive, isolate humor shared by just the two of them.

  Eliza said, An example of Joseph’s innovations is, slave court happens second Thursday of every month, and he rarely involves himself in decisions of crime and punishment unless the sentence is too harsh. And there’s also a health clinic. A doctor comes monthly and inspects the force. And you’ll see their church tomorrow. The slave preachers swap Sundays. Baptist and Methodist. And we’re organizing the older women to take care of the babies so that the young mothers can get back to work.

  —I like to think of The Hurricane as a community, Joseph said. A sort of campus.

  V said, So, if I’m following the thread, your experiment is to test whether Mr. Owen’s thoughts on labor and capital ownership can be applied under a slave economy?

  —The real issue isn’t whether. It’s how. The details shouldn’t concern you.

  V—accustomed to arguing every detail concerning art and music and philosophy and history with Winchester—said, But the ideas interest me. Surely the difference between slave workers and paid workers is too enormous for the experiment to succeed?

  Joseph, testy, said, Obviously it will require adaptations. Owen’s insistence on educating workers beyond the needs of their task would be foolish. And the improvement of wages he advocates isn’t applicable. But as my brother and I have discussed many times, the economic institution we operate under—the bondman model—solves one of the great problems of industrial capitalism, the conflict between capital and labor. And the value of labor itself. Under an Owenism adapted for the South, labor and capital become one and the same. Labor is capital and has a clear market value.

  V paused a moment in disbelief and then said, I suppose the real issue is simply whether anything remains of Owen’s philosophy after all the adaptations for slavery are made?

  Joseph shook his head, sighed a deep sigh, and stood and excused himself, saying, We retire early here. Some of us rise early as well.

  He walked to the door and turned back and said, Miss Howell, I worry that the pains your father has taken to educate you will result in little but finding himself with a wit on his hands.

  V COULDN’T SLEEP. Insects and frogs fell silent. The house made sounds, and the night lay too still to mask them with wind in the trees. A faint two-beat rhythm vibrated all the way from the basement—slaves working the pumps that forced water into the rooftop tank to flush The Hurricane’s amazing toilets.

  She turned the day over and over, penciling thoughts in a notebook. She tried to reconstruct every comment she had made at dinner and couldn’t come up with even the feeblest attempt at wit.

  Mostly, though, V wrote down thoughts of Winchester’s tenderness leaving her there with the Davises, all their noses sharp and hooked as cheap hawkbill knives, parting the air as they moved through the world with hollow cheeks and ashy, distant eyes. She valued Winchester’s tenderness and his kiss partly because at fourteen she had suffered under a violent crush for at least a month. And every time she flung herself at him he backed away so gracefully, so sweetly, that she never felt unduly shamed by her behavior. She wondered if she had been insensitive to him on the upriver trip—overly taken with the glory of the riverboat, the color of gaslight on gold and burgundy wallpaper and carpet. The tiny private sleeping rooms and the power of the great paddle wheel churning muddy water all night provoking intense, condensed dreams of great significance. And above all, the sheer sensation of travel, being suddenly in motion after so long static on her bluff-top looking down on the river.

  She immediately began writing a letter of apology to Winchester.

  A HA
LF HOUR LATER—three quick knuckle raps on V’s door long past the time for that sort of thing. She pulled a dressing gown over her nightgown and opened the door a crack. The oldest daughter, with the questionable name of Florida, bumped right in uninvited, barefoot and wearing just the ultimate layer of thin, ivory night-gear, like she had draped herself in a sheet of linen bandaging. Her dark hair fell loose below her shoulders and her face shaped itself like all the Davises’, narrow and predatory. Florida carried two slim books and an almost-full bottle of red wine. Her gray eyes looked straight at V.

  She said, I may be wrong, but I think we could be good friends.

  —Well, V said. How do you propose finding out?

  —Let’s read our favorite poems to each other, Florida said.

  —Of course. I’ll choose a few from the books I have with me, and we can read together on the porch after breakfast.

  Florida jabbed her books out at V—two stabs—and said, I meant tonight. Now.

  Then she paused and looked down at her feet and flexed her long toes.

  She said, I apologize. Was that pushy? It’s so lonely sometimes, and then you came sweeping in and I got excited. And Old Joe gets touchy about Natchez and wagging tongues, and he only likes to hear opinions that agree with his. I worried everything had gone wrong from the start. And then I saw the light under your door. But we can talk in the morning.

  —Now would be perfect, V said. This minute. I feel so strange, and I don’t know why I’m here.

  —We don’t know why you’re here either, Florida said, very brightly. But we have theories. In a few days, I might tell you some of our secrets.

  —No, V said. If we’re going to be friends, tell one right now.

  Florida thought two beats and then said, This one’s not about you, but it’s the biggest secret here and nobody but Old Joe knows the whole truth of it, and maybe he doesn’t either, really. It’s that not a one of us has a birth certificate. No record of parentage, married or not. Like orphans. Nothing on paper to mark Old Joe’s trail. Not a single footprint. And I’m guessing you probably did hear plenty in Natchez about our complications.