Varina(20)

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.