Varina(25)

The more she saw as he handed the reins to a bondman and walked to the house, the real issue wasn’t really his height. It was his slightness, how finespun his bones must be. Later—bad times during the war and worse times after—he didn’t eat much and wouldn’t have gone a hundred twenty even after one of Mary Chesnut’s feasts, when oysters and turkeys and ducks and doves and bowls of fresh vegetables cooked shiny in pork fat appeared magically out of the scarcity of war. But that first moment she saw him, he carried a little more muscle, say one-forty.

Just before Jeff walked within earshot, Florida said, very dry and ironic, Your Romantic poet arrives. Then she raised her voice so that Jeff could hear her say, Oh, look! He’s out of mourning at last.

V turned to Florida in confusion, and Florida laughed at the confusion she intended to create.

Then to Jeff, Florida said, Good Lord, brighten up. You’re here to meet a pretty girl, not be the subject for a hanging. Cousin Jeffy, darling, I keep trying to tell you how to avoid that preying viper melancholy. It’s simple. Follow my six commandments. Cherish ambition. Cherish pride. Don’t mope. Dismiss the past, because it’s gone for good. Do not defer pleasure whenever and wherever it rears its smiling face. Run from excitement to excitement until the clock winds down. But you can’t seem to learn any but the second commandment. You’re the damned slowest student in the class.

Jeff glanced at V as Florida talked, and then he climbed the steps and removed his flat-brimmed hat and kissed Florida’s cheeks. All smiles and manners—he welcomed V with a quick touch of hands. His hair lay mashed all around by the hatband, and he ran his fingers through it. He wore an unusual cravat, brighter and puffier and more patterned than the current fashion, a sort of peachy color, and it wrapped his neck almost to his sharp jawline. He wore not a hint of black.

Florida swept her hand toward another rocker and said, Join us, Cousin. Since that’s why you saddled your best horse and rode all this way.

—Uncle, he said.

Florida, acting for just the audience of V and Jeff, said, That always sounds so strange, calling you Uncle, since my daddy is more like your daddy than your brother. I’ve decided from now on we’re going to ignore our ridiculous family tree. Too much complication. Girls so young and Old Joe so old. And you’re tending in that direction too if we don’t do something about it. I plan to young you up. As relationships go, Uncle sounds old and imposes a distance and protocol, sets limits that Cousin doesn’t. Way out here in the jungle, I understand cousins even marry now and then. So no arguments, no witness testimony. I’ve adjudicated the matter. We’re all of us cousins except Old Daddy Joe.

V laughed at Florida, and Jeff looked at V, uncomfortable and embarrassed and a little angry.

He recovered and said, Miss Howell, by now you’ve probably learned that anything Cousin Florida says is suspect.

And then to Florida he said, Where is Old Joe? I have a business matter.

—Of course you do. He’s in the office, but you know that. He lives there. Why don’t you show V our steam-powered cotton gin. She’s only been shown it twice since she got here.

Jeff shook his head and kept walking. After he passed through the front door, Florida turned to look at V.

All it took was a lift of eyebrow on V’s part and Florida started spilling a story.

She told how Jeff’s first little wife, Knoxie, remained close in his heart long after her death, her loss haunting him to the extent that he had lived in almost hermitic seclusion for nearly a decade. How in the early days of mourning—after Jeff and Pemberton went to Havana to sketch and read and recover from her loss and Jeff got arrested as a spy by the Cubans because he sketched too many fortifications—he and Pemberton had lived like savages out on Brierfield, going a month at a time without sticking their heads out of their hole—living in nearly identical log cabins they built themselves. It was just Jeff and Pemberton and a few slaves. Jeff would turn up his sleeves and clear land all day like he didn’t care if he worked himself to death or anybody else either. Florida said that Jeff and Pemberton had been together since before West Point, and after graduation—because Jeff’s grades were poor and a few of the faculty wrote scathing letters of evaluation—they found themselves stationed way up in the northwest wilderness. Nothing but dark fir forests and cold rivers, and frontier forts. Stockades of palings with the bark left on, the top ends sharpened to points with axes, like rows of upright primitive pencils. Otherwise just bears and wolves and Indians and British and French moving south out of Canada. Then before long Knoxie and Jeff fell in love. Her daddy, Zachary Taylor, was the officer in charge of the fort and didn’t want his daughter to marry a soldier, or at least didn’t want her to marry Cousin Jeff. So Jeff quit the army. They ran off and got married with none of her people there, and headed down the river on their honeymoon. Before they made it to New Orleans, they both got sick, and she died but he did not. That song “The Fairy Bells”—she was singing it when she died in his arms. At least that was the story. And he’d been wearing some degree of mourning ever since—seven years—until today.


A FEW DAYS LATER, Jeff invited V to ride with him and have a look at Brierfield. The Hurricane’s horse barn was two dozen stalls at least, filled with beautiful Kentucky thoroughbreds. V walked to the barn in what she had always worn riding since she started at five or six, a split skirt for sitting astride. She rode well due to lessons and lots of lonely hours along the bluffs of the Mississippi, jumping gullies and fallen trees.