Varina(31)

The porter says, Must make it easier roaming the white world in those clothes.

James looks down at himself. He smiles, shakes his head, shrugs his shoulders.


ON THE WAY BACK TO ALBANY, James hunches over his notebook. Trying to remember exact phrases, particular observations. Compounding her unreliable memory with his own.

Very fast, he scribbles a conversation—rehearsing for next week:

—Was I born enslaved?

—I can’t answer because I don’t know. And why should it matter? That world’s dead and gone.

—No, it’s not. The answer won’t change how I feel about myself, but it matters. It’s a fact about my life I need to know.

—That’s not your real question. Just voice it.

—All right, then. Did you ever own me?





Third Sunday





Saratoga Springs


—A DECADE, THAT’S THE NUMBER, V SAYS.

—Pardon?

—The past week I’ve estimated how much of my life since the age of twenty-five I spent wearing mourning. By the second half of the war so many had died that black silk disappeared. After little Joe fell, I had to wear cotton darkened with a muddy brew of walnut hulls and indigo. Those big black dresses wore you rather than the other way around. When we left Richmond, I had just shed the black from Joe.

—I thought about a lot of things last week too, James says. I keep trying to remember that journey, but all I come up with are those brief flashes. I’m not sure whether they’re real or if I’m inventing them.

—For me, those fugitive months keep rolling back in great detail no matter how hard I try to push them behind me. I’ve accepted that they’re the axle of my life. Everything turns around them.

—A place where a road splits in two is one thing I keep seeing. A Y with a big white house in the fork.





Abbeville


1865


WET MOST DAYS FROM CHARLOTTE INTO SOUTH CAROLINA.

This particular day had been every kind of weather from fog to fine showers to moments of sunshine to a brief thunderstorm in the early afternoon. So at camp that evening, firewood was damp and took time to light and then burned smoky and slow. Six miles at best from breaking one camp to setting up the next—bad time for sure. Except Delrey, a stoic philosopher of physical endurance, discouraged that kind of thinking. He had various sayings, doled out a sentence at a time as V needed them, each one a nugget of wisdom. She recorded examples in her notebook.

We’re not by any means getting to Florida in one sprint, so don’t start counting days or miles.

The end of every day has to leave all of us able to get up in the morning and do it all over again and then do it again day after tomorrow.

You have to get your mind right, and always look way down the road, not at your feet.

The slowest man sets the pace because we’re not the kind of people to leave anybody behind.

In a collapse of such magnitude—a provisional country scoured to bare nubs—rules of behavior wash away. V knew the men accompanying her still suffered under the old rules, but the day they realized that everything had changed would be when they either slipped away in the dark feeling ashamed or told her to her face she deserved her fate and put spur to flank and rode toward home in broad daylight. And over the course of that April week—day and night—most of them did leave, taking horses and mules and what supplies they could carry and abandoning unnecessary wagons by the side of the road with the tongues angling to the dirt. V, though, believed Delrey would stay with her to the end of the road, and she knew Burton would.


MIDAFTERNOON, a rider came up from behind, pushing his horse at a trot hard enough to cover ground for hours but not enough to break the horse down. He wore farmer clothes—butterscotch canvas pants with dirty bagged-out knees, scuffed brogans, a worn-out straw hat. But V knew right off he was a cavalryman. He didn’t announce it, but he posted smoothly and elegantly, and he wore interesting facial hair, as many in the cavalry tended to do. He had managed to leave the war with a fine sorrel gelding, its coat the color of copper in the sun. Battle wounds marked its hide, and it was weary and skinny from hard traveling—in need of grain and a month to rest and graze and become magnificent again. The saddle had once been as fine as the horse, but wear and weather left the flaps curling and leather peeling down to the tree at the pommel.

The man said his name was Biddle and that he was on the way home to a little town south of the Florida line where his family had a smallish plantation.

He said, If you’uns are who I think you are, I talked my way around a rough gang fifty miles back saying they were after the treasure caravan. Said a million in gold would make them all rich for life.

—And they think we have it? Burton said.

—Yes.

V held her hands out, palms up. Said, A million? We can barely feed the children.

—Yes, ma’am, Biddle said.

—Talked your way past them, how? Burton said.

—I claimed to be a dirt farmer.

—And that’s your plow horse? V said.

—They didn’t seem like the kind of men who attend to details. I’m just saying, they were questioning people. Asking had I seen a couple of ambulance wagons, a fancy woman and some children and a handful of men.

V looked at Delrey and under her breath said, Do I look fancy? I sure don’t feel fancy.