Varina(12)

James Blake says, I only remember boats, gray water, and blue sky. Silver coins flashing and tinkling in the air and splashing in the water.


V SAYS, A hundred thousand tragedies played out in the spring of 1865. We’d bet everything on anger and angry ideas, and we lost. Lee once wrote Jeff a letter—during a particularly nasty little moment of decision—in which he advised against action that he feared would bring down the reproach of our consciences and posterity’s judgment. But by then, it was too late to apply Lee’s advice more widely because we were in the middle of trying to pull apart a country to protect the wealth of slave owners. There was no going back. Bad, angry decisions left behind a huge cost in life and suffering for the entire nation. And utter loss of wealth for the South. But not for the North. Plenty made fortunes off the war. Give a real Yankee one little dried pea and three thimbles and he can buy groceries. Give him a boxful of cheap, shiny pocketknives and pistols to trade and he will turn it into a career. But give him a war, and he’ll make a fortune to last centuries. It’s not something they learn. They’re saturated in it from birth. End result—we lose everything and they create thousands of new millionaires.

—Bitter feelings still, ma’am?

—No. The people who beat you get to take you apart however they wish.

—Certainly sounds bitter.

—It’s reality. We lost. I’ve lived in New York City for more than fifteen years and it’s been good for me. I’ve made much of my living writing for the papers and have learned a great deal there. And in London too. It does your mind good to talk to people different from you. Especially instructive in regard to opinions about owning people and trying to kill a country. I’ve come to accept that our debt may stretch to one of those generational Bible curses. Unto the seventh son of the seventh son. Born on the seventh hour of the seventh day.

—I don’t believe that’s from the Bible.

—I’m sure it’s in there somewhere, V says. Seven is a powerful number.


JAMES SAYS, IN SOUTH CAROLINA—the Sea Islands the year after the war—I announced that Mr. Davis was a fine man, and the black children I was in school with fought me, backed me up against a wall. And then before long I was in a northern school with nothing but white children—Massachusetts—and when I said Jefferson Davis was a fine man, they called me every derogatory racial name they knew and fought me. It’s all here in Miss Botume’s book.

—I’m certain you stood up and fought back. You were a strong-minded child. But I’m sharing personal memories with you, and all you’re doing is telling me things from a book. So please tell me something you remember that’s not from the book.

James pauses and then says, Pictures mostly. Steep steps and high ceilings. A big room with the other children. Tall windows looking down to a lawn. A fierce red rocking horse bouncing in a frame with four big metal springs, and I pinched my hand in a spring and bled. I picture children sitting on a staircase, looking down through balusters to a party with people wearing black and white clothes, listening to music—a piano and a violin. An enormous green field, all of us running and spinning and blue sky whirling. Another time, a room and a fire, loud flashes of lightning, people yelling, babies crying.

—Yes, V says. Every bit of that.


—THE DAY YOU FLED RICHMOND, some might have kissed me good-bye and sent me on my way. Back to being a stray.

—Maybe so, but I held on to you until I realized keeping you with me was worse for you than letting you go.

—That long trip south, James says. I wish I remembered more of it.

—Oh, I’ll tell you everything you want to know. Write a book if you feel like it. Everybody seems to be inventing their own history and finding a publisher. Just don’t write a tiresome biography—they all end the same way. But it’s getting late, and since Albany is so nearby, we might reconvene to talk more next Sunday.

—Of course.

—Come about noon. I’ll arrange lunch here, or maybe we’ll picnic at the races. I like to see the little jockeys in their silk clothes and the green grass and white fences and big trees. But mostly I love looking at the horses beforehand more than the race itself. I rode well when I was young and can see things in their eyes and facial expressions and deportment that tell me how they feel about running that day. Sometimes I just know it’s their day, a feeling not like a wave raging and breaking but a smooth swell almost ready to curl over. I bet a few dollars at a time and win more than I lose. I pay for my entertainment.

As James stands to leave, V says, When I was younger, I might have dreamed your arrival beforehand like I did that place where we were all captured. Every feature of south Georgia landscape exact—the road, a swale down to a creek, pine trees, fallow fields. Even the placement of the tents on either side of the road. But that gift or curse left me soon after the war. I still have vivid dreams, but now they never correspond with reality.





Second Sunday





Saratoga Springs


THE SARATOGA RAILWAY STATION PULSES WITH RACE-DAY foot traffic, the energy of hope funneling people out the doors and toward the track. James Blake, blue book in hand, weaves his way to a clear space at the end of the platform. That scream down the hall of The Retreat repeats in his head. He’s tried all week to decode the tone, whether it arose from some specific marital fight or from general anger, anguish, fear, frustration with life.