Varina(27)
—God or chance, one saved the house, Pemberton said. The wind faced square around and shoved the fire back over black land it had just crossed. It soon burned out to smoke and embers.
He looked at Jeff and said, I’ll never forget the look on your face when your hat flew off.
Jeff laughed and said, Maybe short judgment on both our parts in regard to the wind and closeness of the burn pile to the new house and the woods.
V AND JEFF took a roundabout path back to The Hurricane, often at a gallop, daring each other to jump ditches and fences and downed tree trunks. And then, both of them still flushed and breathing hard from the wild ride, Jeff tried to kiss her in the barn aisle. The light was dim and brown except where high western windows cast angling yellow beams. Dust of hay drifted in the beams and hovered and disappeared into darkness.
The strange light flattered Jeff, made him look dramatic as an actor on a stage. He leaned into her, and she only had to touch his shoulder with a finger to ease him back.
That night V wrote to her mother:
I do not know whether this Jeff Davis is young or old. He looks both at times. But he must be old. I hear he is only two years younger than you are. He seems remarkable, but of uncertain temper. He takes for granted that everybody agrees with him when he expresses an opinion, which offends me. Yet he has a sweet voice and a winning manner of asserting himself. He is the kind of person who would rescue you from a mad dog at any risk, but then insist on stoical indifference to the fright afterward.
Love from Your daughter in exile,
V
What she didn’t describe to her mother was that she found him very handsome in a lean, bony way. And he was bookish—adored words whether on the page or delivered in oratory. Out at Brierfield she had noticed stacks of books on a table by a leather chair. He had told her that what he wanted at sixteen was to study law so that he would have time to write. Told her that in another world he might have had a happy life as a small-town lawyer scribbling poetry and history in his office when he should have been dealing with real estate contracts or petty lawsuits. But when Jeff was fourteen, Joseph began calling upon connections among the wealthy men of the state, and eventually West Point began the arc of Jeff’s destiny. And as he emerged from his long mourning—which in itself seemed romantic to seventeen-year-old V—he had become interested in politics, especially writing and delivering speeches. He was thinking about running for public office someday—by which V assumed he meant on a local or state level. She wrote the words The Briers and Brierfield over and over in her notebook, wondering if there might be some interconnection, some motif worth noting. An affinity or a warning.
DAYS AFTER HER TOUR OF BRIERFIELD, V kept trying to understand Jeff and Pemberton. And Benjamin Montgomery as well. She grew up a town girl and their beautiful rental home seldom required more than a cook and a couple of house servants and a man to take care of the lawn and their few horses. Her family never had individual servants around long enough to know them well. They came and went because of WB’s theory—why take on the responsibilities of ownership when you can rent?
She knew true cotton plantations were meant to be horrific places, but Old Joe’s strange version of Owenist social ideas confused her. She resolved to read up on the topic. And Jeff’s friendship with Pemberton also confused her. She assumed that on Jeff’s side of the pair, he had depended on Pemberton for all sorts of things over the years. At West Point, Pemberton would have taken care of laundry, cleaned the room, polished boots, emptied wastebaskets, carried letters to post, transported embargoed liquor in and out of the dormitory. All those student needs. Later, up in the forests of the north wilderness—way past so many furcations of the Mississippi that it cut a path through the land no wider than a common river—she imagined Pemberton’s jobs would have been to chop wood, carry water, build fires, butcher deer, saddle horses, brush dirt off buckskin jackets at day’s end. They had known each other before V was born, and they treated each other as friends. But even then, seventeen, she knew that could not be the full relationship.
A lifetime later—Jeff and Pemberton both dead and V living in New York City, much to the anger of the southern press—she tried to jot a thought about the two men, a memory, a brief note about them for her own memoir, having recently worn herself to the nub finishing Jeff’s after he died in the middle of his opening chapters.
She wrote:
Don’t think about the existence of an artifact representative of that time, the whipping post. It played no direct part in their decades together. One could be with them for days and forget that their fundamental relationship was anything but friendship and respect and mutual responsibility stretching back to youth. But then something would happen. A small shift in Jeff’s tone of voice asking for the second time that some minor task be done, a moment of ignoring Pemberton as if he weren’t there. Flashes of language and particular tones of rudeness revealed that the relationship between the two men was deeply complex. That the fundamental note of their long history together condensed to a simple fact—one member of the friendship was owner and the other was both labor and capital. And then the shadow of that post traced divisions clear and precise as the sweeping shadow of a sundial.
WHEN V FINALLY MADE IT BACK to Natchez in March, sort of engaged to Jeff—but more on that later—she asked around about Pemberton’s dollar worth, describing in general a bondman of his qualifications—his experience, his subtlety, his mannerly way of communicating, his skill in navigating the gulf between owners and workers. She omitted his literacy and his love of newspapers, which might have skewed the results. Estimates were, Pemberton would cost as much as the house a blacksmith or baker or milliner lived in, maybe even as much as Jeff’s finest thoroughbred.