Varina(26)

Jeff looked at her with some concern. He said, We’ll need to retack. I’ve had a sidesaddle ready for you on a reliable gelding, very calm.

V walked down the barn aisle and saw a bay mare looking white-eyed out of the stall. V held out the back of her hand and the horse leaned her velvet nose and took a deep breath and relaxed her ears, though she kept tossing her head and then made one quick spin in the stall and came back to breathe V’s hand.

V said, Her, please.


THEY RODE OUT to Brierfield side by side, sometimes at a walk and sometimes racing along past stretches of woods and big empty fields and pastures and smaller fields of cool weather crops—greens and root vegetables mostly. During the walking, they talked about the personalities of horses and about his house. The nearer they came to Brierfield the more Jeff apologized for his miscalculations in the design. He aspired to equal his namesake in every regard, and this was only his first attempt as architect.

When they arrived, V saw that he was right to apologize. The house was no Monticello. Just a plastered cat-and-clay construction without even a real chimney of stone or brick, just more cat-and-clay. The house lacked a gallery and made do with an awkwardly proportioned stoop sheltering the front door. The windows sat high on the walls and very small.

A black man, middle-aged, met them in the yard and held V’s mare as she dismounted. He stood a couple of inches taller than Jeff, nearly as slim, and he wore about the same clothes Jeff did, except a little more worn. And a fine Panama hat frazzled at the front edge of the brim. Long fingers with big joints. Unless he was being addressed, his eyes looked into the middle distance like a hunter with a gun in his hands waiting.

Jeff said, Thank you, Pemberton. I’m going to show Miss Howell around and then we’ll go back to The Hurricane shortly, so no need to untack. Just water and a little hay to keep them busy. Then come find us. If Miss Howell has questions about what we’ve done here and what we plan to do, I might need your help explaining.

As Pemberton led the horses away, V couldn’t stop looking at him. She had expected him to be some deep friend from West Point, a fellow newly minted lieutenant up on the northern frontier—half of a special pairing that human males make in late adolescence and sometimes have a hard time giving up.

Instead, Jeff owned Pemberton, held title to him. Legal papers.

V said, So, how long . . . ?

Jeff said, Since I was fourteen.


WALKING INSIDE THE HOUSE jolted the senses. The main room stretched long and dark, like a grand hallway. The little dim windows with the sills very high felt even odder from inside, like something to shoot arrows at attackers from, except you’d need a tall ladder to do it. Scant furniture hovered around cavernous fireplaces at either end of the long room, and no paintings marred the high walls. Dimensions warped and distorted, the geometry strange and lacking correspondence to human scale. All it needed was for the walls to stand out of parallel with each other and the floors to slope at several angles to make the place truly crazy.

V walked twice around the room trying to think of something to say. She settled in front of one of the giant fireplaces. She could almost walk into it. A fire hardly bigger around than the lid to a stewpot smoked in one corner like an afterthought.

She finally said, Well, this looks like it was built in Queen Elizabeth’s time, to roast a sheep whole.

A woman came out from the kitchen and asked if they would like tea or coffee.

They took their coffee outside in chairs under a big live oak to the side of the house. In a few minutes, Pemberton came carrying a cup of tea and without a word sat down with them, which seemed unusual to V.

V said, I hear you were up in the north woods?

Pemberton said, A long time ago, miss.

Jeff said, Pemberton and I—for a lark—made the first known overland passage from Prairie du Chien to Chicago.

—Mainly to get away from that muddy fort for a while, Pemberton said.


THE THREE OF THEM walked out past the kitchen gardens and the cow barn and horse barn, all scaled smaller than at The Hurricane because Brierfield only encompassed a thousand acres. Jeff and Pemberton explained that they still had plans to clear a couple hundred more acres for cotton someday but didn’t want to lose all the woods.

Pemberton said, This place didn’t get its name for nothing. First time we saw it, this place was a tangle. Plenty of cutting and burning—plenty of brush piles and log piles. Smoke in the air for years.

Jeff said, You remember that day we let the burn pile get out of hand?

Pemberton laughed and said, We nearly burned the world down.

Pemberton pointed nearby—a couple of hundred feet—and told how, as they cleared for the house site, they piled brush and pines and root ends of hardwoods to the size of a biggish cow barn. Said they’d let the pile dry for the months it took to build the house and then doused it with not much coal oil at four points of the compass and struck fire. The pile sizzled for a few minutes trying to find its voice, and then it went up with a great roaring suck of air that lifted the hat off Jeff’s head and spun it high in the sky and then pulled it into the flames that stood taller than the tops of the biggest trees. The hat burned in one quick fizz. Before long, the wind carried the fire into the living woods. The pines caught first and the needles burned fast with a sound like tearing paper and flashed great sparks, and soon the woods were burning down and black smoke rose at a steep pitch toward heaven.