Varina(21)

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.