Varina(33)

Delrey watched him go and said, That child can mortally fly.

V took the brown scabs and crushed them to beige powder in a teacup with the back of a silver spoon, and then spilled the powder onto a saucer and pursed her lips and puffed the powder up the noses of Jimmie and Winnie, knowing they would get sick and might possibly die. Many people reacted to the inoculation with a slight fever and that was it—no smallpox for them. Some raised a few blisters and quickly got better. A scant few percent became very sick and passed to the next world. Like everyone inoculating, V was figuring odds, gambling. If Jimmie or Winnie took the actual pox full-on, they had less than fifty-fifty odds of living. With the inoculation, nine out of ten lived. When V finished, Winnie howled in outrage. Jimmie blinked watery eyes and stood with his fists clenched until V kissed him on the forehead and sent him back to Billy and Jeffy, squatting by the fire.

V bowed her head slightly to the north and then to the east. Praising Boston and Africa. Cotton Mather’s slave Onesimus had taught him how to do it, how to powder the scabs and blow them up the nose. Or make a shallow cut in the skin and rub the powder in. Something they did back in Africa. Yankees put much stock in the famous Puritan witch-killer Mather, and V had read plenty of that crazy old man’s thoughts, all the fear and dread he cursed America with down to the tenth generation. But Yankees loved to claim relation with him and all those other fanatics that came over here to establish their own flavor of dictatorship led by preacher tyrants. Winchester had made V read their writings, and even at fifteen she believed the English were right. Those people needed to be locked up. But instead, they ran to the wilderness and found the freedom to be as crazy as they wanted and to kill Indians and bothersome witch women and to drive a poison nail into the head of this country that still hasn’t been pulled out.


THE HOUSE IN ABBEVILLE stood in the Y where Main Street divides. A large, pretty house, its two-acre wedge of land filled with green lawn and foundation azaleas blooming scarlet and purple and white. The fugitives arrived an hour after dark, tired and dingy and hungry. Smelling like campfire and worse. The house rose before them like a white monument from a lost world. It belonged to Armistead Burt, and he didn’t worry about Federal retaliation for offering hospitality to old friends on the run.

V held Winnie, who had taken a fever for half a day but seemed to be getting better. Jimmie had only one little pox welt under his chin. He and the other children peered out from the ambulance bed with aspects like the force of a great explosion had recently passed over them. Burton, his eyes dead in his face, sat hunched and braced with both hands on the pommel, his elbows locked to hold the weight of his torso.

V said, You’re tingling from fatigue like the rest of us.

—No, Burton said. I’m fine. He sat up straight.

—Just claim it, V said. I know you’ll ride till you fall out of the saddle, but at this point, denying is nothing but young-man pride.

—All right. I could use supper and a washcloth and a basin of warm water and a ten-hour nap.

Yellow lamplight behind the muntins and stiles of the windows projected geometric figures onto the dark lawn. The front door burst open and Mary Chesnut came flowing out. She hollered in her thin little-woman voice, Where the hell have you fools been? I’d have called for the home guard to go find you, except they’ve all run off to surrender and sign the loyalty oath. We wondered if the rounders and outliers had swarmed you. Good Lord, come here to me. We haven’t hugged in months. We’ve got food and wine and hot water and clean beds. The men and children can all fall out when they want, but you can’t sleep until at least one in the morning because I’ve so many questions that need answers. The Burts aren’t due back for a few days. They went to see if their house in Columbia burned along with most of the town—and mine too. They left me in charge, since they’re running the house like a refuge hotel until we all get home or get arrested or make a clean getaway.

—I’m so tired, V said.

—You never said that when we were nineteen in Washington City, Mary Chesnut said.

—I’ll do my best, V said, rallying. In fact, I’ll set my goal to put you to bed with a kiss on the forehead when the sun comes up, like I’ve done so many times before.

—You all clean up and we’ll eat and then we’ll put the weak ones to bed and meet in the parlor, she said. I’ll have wine and suchlike.


EARLY ON WHEN SHE AND MARY MET in Washington—both teens married to congressmen, living and dining in Brown’s Hotel and calling it their mess—they were famous enemies for the first month. Too much alike and neither used to sharing the attention that came with being young and smart and pretty. Every evening the sound of their crossfire over the dinner table was only partially muffled by laughter. Each of them made a dramatic public show of tolerating the other. Then they had a cup of tea—just the two of them, no audience—and it took about ten minutes to make peace, and before long they began getting together in their rooms before parties to comment on how their dresses hung.

Back then Mary’s housemaid, Phoebe, said to V, Missus Mary won’t ever get no babies.

—Why? V said.

—Too narrow across the hips.

Phoebe held her hands up, faced her palms about eight inches apart. Which was a slight exaggeration. But whether for that reason or some other, over the years of Mary’s marriage, Phoebe’s prophecy proved true. As far as V knew, Mary had never been even briefly pregnant, much less carried a child to term.