Varina(39)

V couldn’t think what to say except, Even the house Jeff is paying to build?

—Strong argument to be made that it falls under the heading of improvements to the property conveying to the owner. Meaning me. Have you even looked at Jeff’s will?

—No.

—I wrote it. Should make interesting reading. If Jeff dies—whether it’s fighting in Mexico or whatnot—you don’t inherit anything except the right to keep living here as a dependent of mine until you pass away or find some crazy old widower with a cornfield and a hog-lot out at Catahoula Lake willing to take you on.

—That sump? V said.

—Oh, you exaggerate. I’m sure there are a couple of fine weeks in spring. Anyhow, I’ll have relevant passages of the will scribed so you can see your situation for yourself. You’ll enjoy the Latin terms that crop up pretty often. And then you go on ahead and write Jeff to confirm. But meanwhile, considering your position, you need to amend your tone toward me.

—I will begin that effort tomorrow. Until then I’ll think about what kind of low price you’re establishing for selling out a sibling. By the way, has Jeff ever even seen the will you wrote for him?

—He signed it, you grubbing little bitch, Joseph said.

All the women sat quietly at their places. Florida wouldn’t even look V in the eye.

V had planned to spend the night at The Hurricane staying up late with Florida. But she walked all the way back to Brierfield alone in the dark. She sat by one of the giant fireplaces with her mind whirling until eventually she stirred a full packet of medicine into a glass of wine and waited for the spin to slow.

—Catahoula Lake? she said aloud, her voice echoing down the long, dark room. That’s what Old Joe wanted her to think was her best prospect in widowhood? In dry weather it was nothing but a great expanse of damp ground. Hogs running open range on the lake bottom. V thought of her aunt Jane, who inherited a fortune from her first old dead husband and then married a much younger man and soon decided to divorce him, during which procedure the young husband killed the judge in the case in a pistol duel. A scandal, yes. But more bearable, V imagined, than marrying a Catahoula hog farmer.


WHEN SHE FELL INTO BED AT DAWN, V had decided to run back to Natchez and never see Davis Bend or any Davis ever again. Two days later, on the next down-bound boat, she departed. Elusive V, she didn’t announce her plans to anyone but Pemberton, swearing him to secrecy. She showed up, to much surprise, on her parents’ doorstep with a trunk and three bags. She claimed the letter announcing her visit must have gone astray.

She stayed only a week. Her father hardly noticed she was there. He had yet another doomed business scheme simmering, and her mother fretted constantly about his lack of sense in regard to money and how desperately tight running the household constricted her, how heavy their lack of funds crushed. All the mouths to feed. V spent sunsets and evenings in a chair near the bluff looking down on the river, watching yellow lights flicker across the dark water from passing boats and barges and rafts.

A week later, she beat back against the Mississippi current to Brierfield, knowing that no matter which path she chose from then on—whether she flew away forever and changed her name and became a dowdy governess or went to New Orleans and became a fancy courtesan—dependency would doubtless follow. Might as well stay at the Bend and fight for her place.


PEMBERTON RALLIED THE SLAVES AROUND V, and she began a letter-writing campaign to Jeff in Mexico. Once or twice a week, Old Joe came out and harassed her about progress on the house construction, which with Pemberton’s help she kept at a slow drag.

Joe would ride up and start complaining about the lack of progress before he even dismounted. V stood smiling and saying that if it were up to her they would be much further along. But what an unexpected amount of preparation would be needed before the laying of the foundation. If it were not for slow transport of materials to their remote outpost, faster progress might be made. She wished their efforts were more immediately successful, and if she were a builder herself and could lay brick and swing a hammer, they might be. Would that it were different.

What a friend she made of the subjunctive mood.

Eliza quit being polite and pretending to like V and stopped all communication with Brierfield. The other girls followed along, including Florida, the one V always considered the best of them, the only one worth caring about. Florida seemed to believe all their lies about V and only wrote a couple of brief notes expressing her concern for V’s mental state and defending the others without knowing a pinch of truth about the shady deeds and wills that would determine V’s future if she let them stand as the documents that bound her for life. All the women of The Hurricane lay under Old Joe’s thumb just as he intended V to be. And maybe that’s also what Jeff intended for her if he died—leave her roped tight to the Davis wealth, forever bound to him by money as tight as he held Knoxie in memory.

V wrote all the Davis women separate identical notes saying she perfectly understood Joseph’s hatred, antipathy, and disrespect, but did any one of them understand hers toward them?

She held herself together to withstand Old Joe’s outrage every time he rode to Brierfield for an inspection of construction progress. And, yes, sometimes at night she allowed herself room to express her full emotions in letters to Jeff. After all, marriage is not just a business partnership. Of course, as she suspected and confirmed later, Old Joe’s letters to Jeff made her out to be a madwoman, hysterical and out of control despite his constant kind and gentle efforts. He argued that her youth and inexperience made her responsibilities at Brierfield overwhelming. He suggested she might wish to move back to Natchez until the war ended and Jeff returned. That sort of self-serving thing. But V was where she was. She intended to fight her battles where she stood, with the boundary between the two properties as her front line.