Varina(2)

—If you haven’t noticed, she says, we’re a furious nation, and war drums beat in our chest. Our leaders proclaim better than they negotiate. The only bright spot is, the right side won. My only advice is to be where you are now—don’t look back. Otherwise, good luck and good day, sir.

—My apologies, Mrs. Davis. I saw in the Albany paper that you were here, and I wanted to see you and ask about this book and about the children. I don’t recall all the names, but I remember Joe.

—What could you possibly know about Joe?

—I remember sitting with the others, trying to wake him up.

V pauses and then says, I don’t know what you’re after, but I’ve dealt with confidence artists for decades. Or else you’re just recalling the funeral. Thousands attended.

—Not the funeral. I remember him lying on the pavement. And I remember him that night, upstairs. So still on the big bed with candles and flowers all around. He’d gotten smaller and very white, and his lips were a color I’d never seen. He looked like himself, but changed. It terrified me. I remember people coming and going late in the night. Every lamp and candle in the house lit and all the windows open and curtains blowing out.

V says, I’m lost.


SHE WORKS AT REMEMBRANCE, looks harder at Blake’s broad forehead, brown skin, curling hair graying at the temples. She tries to cast back four decades to the war. When she arrived, who was there in that huddle of people on the cobbles beneath the balcony of the house stupidly called the Confederate White House?

She had been down by the river making an appearance at a celebration—a mass of people welcoming a boatload of men and women returned through prisoner exchange from Northern detention. A brass band played “Home, Sweet Home.” The kind of event where V’s every move was watched side-eyed by those hoping for a gossip-worthy moment. She stood near her carriage and chatted with Mary Chesnut, who had been circulating through the crowd birdlike in her brief, bright attentions—snapping up bits of language, facial expressions, details of wardrobe, witty comments, stupid comments, moments of human grace and foolishness—every detail of observation to be entered into her journal at day’s end.

A man, a stranger, walked up and stood close like trying to eavesdrop on their conversation. Then low and breathy, looking oddly off to the side, he said, Little Joe has gotten himself killed.

V turned to her driver, and trying not to scream said, Get me home now.

A fast rattling dash—the driver popping his whip above the horses, their shoes striking sparks off the cobbles—and she found a crowd arranged in concentric arcs below the balcony at the high end of the house. Gawkers stood at the fringes, then a few neighbors and their servants, and then Ellen and the children ringed tight around Joe. He had recently turned five and had fallen twenty feet and lay completely broken on the cobblestones. Ellen bent over trying to hug the live children and to ease them away from Joe. But when she saw V, Ellen collapsed onto her knees and buried her face in her hands.

The children—Maggie and Jeffy and Billy and Jimmie—sat on the pavers saying Joe’s name and trying to nudge him out of sleep. Joe lay on his side, and his limbs formed strange angles. A puddle of blood the size of a saucer thickened beneath his head. Maggie held Joe’s hand and the three boys kept touching his shoulder. Joe and Jimmie were close to the same age and often shared clothes.

—Missus V, Ellen said. He was playing and fell between the railings. Must have.

With her face all scared and confused, Ellen looked so young.

V remembers trying to kneel beside Joe, how pregnant she was at the time, how heavy and awkward. She remembers looking at him and touching his face and feeling numb. And then slipping sideways from her knees onto her hip, a hard jolt against the cobbles. And then the new baby began flailing inside her.


V HOLDS HER RIGHT HAND OUT toward James Blake, pushes at him like gesturing Stop. Then she presses her left palm against the fingertips and bends the right hand back toward her wrist. She presses hard, but ninety degrees is her limit.

She says, Show me.

James Blake bends his hand until the fingernails almost fold against the top of his forearm. An inch gap.

—Lately, I can’t go all the way back, he says.

—You’re Jimmie Limber.

—I don’t remember that name, but I believe the Jimmie in this book is me.

He holds out the bristling blue book.

V won’t take it. She reaches two fingers and touches the inside of his wrist as if testing his pulse, his materiality.

—I don’t need a book to know you, she says. I’ve believed for years that all my boys were long gone, crossed over. I’ve thought of it as my diminishing circle of boys pinching to a black point, like the period at the end of a sentence. But here you are.

—I hardly know anything about my life then, he says.

—Sit down and I’ll tell you what I remember.





Fugitive


1865


THINGS FELL APART SLOWLY BEFORE THEY FELL APART fast. Late March—Friday night before Richmond burned—V fled the false White House and the capital city. That afternoon she and Ellen Barnes packed in a rush, knowing they might never be back. Billy and Jimmie went back and forth from V to Ellen, touching their arms or hips for reassurance. Ellen always kept her hair parted in the middle and oiled, pulled back tight against her scalp. But that day, long curling strands escaped, and she kept sweeping them back from her face.