Varina(4)

And Mary would probably have something much better than Dover’s, which was not even close to pharmaceutical quality. She called Dover’s housewife morphine, because along with opium it contained fillers like ipecacuanha, which in doses too small to cause vomiting induces sweating, thought to be good for women of fiery temperament. And also potassium sulfate, a laxative. So, a little morphine, a good sweat, and a bowel movement—the cure for everything that ails you.


V WAITED, but after a time the children still hadn’t settled. Fretting became weeping. Jeffy called her name. And when you’re called you answer, one way or the other.

V chose yes. She climbed back to the bed and knelt and lit a little brass-and-glass candle lantern. She gathered the children to her, hugging each of them separately and then all together like an enormous stinky bouquet. She held baby Winnie in her lap and began teaching the older children a song—“Alouette”—making a game of it, finding a correspondence between the bucking and swaying of the ambulance and the tub-thumping, foot-stomping rhythm of the song, the accumulating repetitions. Je te plumerai la tête.

They played along happily for a while, in a language they didn’t know, singing a song of cheerful butchery. All the details of plucking the lovely skylark’s feathers and pulling off its beak and legs and wings, its eyes and head. They all shuffled a little dance for a few moments of joy, shouting not words but sounds, their thin shoulders and angular arms and grubby hands expressing music in jagged movement.

And then they fell back happy and breathing hard onto the quilts. Soon they fell asleep, except for Jimmie Limber, who lay looking up at candle shadows on the arched canvas. He murmured the doubled three-beat chorus, dropping high to low—Et la tête, et la tête, et les yeux, et les yeux. Over and over.

V kissed him and said, Sleep, little man.

—Got us a long night? Jimmie Limber said.

—We need it to be, V said. If we’re going to make it to Havana.

She kissed his forehead again and blew out the candle and climbed back over the wagon seat.

Delrey shifted the reins to one hand and lifted his hat and set it on his lap and scratched the crown of his head. He said, We really going all night?

—Camp at dawn off in the woods. Become nocturnal as possums, V said.

*

—Wait, James Blake says. Before you go on, I’m all confused about children. I’m not even imagining this right, much less remembering.

—Seven often seemed like a lot of children to me too, V says.

—But I just remember Joe. And a boy around my age and possibly an older girl.

—You’re conflating Jeffy and Billy. You would have been halfway between them in age. And Maggie was enough older she would have largely ignored you little boys. But this will be easier on paper. Hand me your notebook and pencil.

James turns to a fresh page and watches as V draws dashes and lines and writes dates and names and place-names. She numbers the names and strikes lines through two of them and swoops a pair of brackets and hands back the open notebook.

—Attend, please, she says. And then she talks James through the list of names, explaining a family tree. Says, Samuel there, top of the chart, number one? Born in Washington?

—Yes. With a line through his name.

—Meaning that when your memory begins, Samuel had been gone ten years. You never knew him. And then Maggie? Number two, also born in Washington. Not struck through, so still alive when your memory begins and the only one alive now. Then Jeffy, born in Washington with no line through his name, so still alive when you came to us, though he passed away more than twenty-five years ago of yellow fever. And now skip down to number six, Billy—also born in Washington and with no line, though he died in Memphis a few years after the war. Diphtheria. Now go back to numbers four and five. Four is Joe, born in Washington, and you’re there bracketed with him because you two were the same age. I have Richmond after your name with a question mark, because I assume that’s where you were born but don’t know for sure. And then finally, number seven, Winnie. Born in Richmond right after Joe died and a crying lap-baby when we ran south. She died nearly eight years ago.

V says, The point I’m making is that Joe’s death is your memory’s year zero—spring, 1864.

She reaches to his notebook and turns back the page corner and says, For future reference.

—Did one of the boys have black hair and a cannon? James asks.

—See, conflation. Billy was the only child with my dark hair, and Jeffy had a miniature cannon. The neighbors complained constantly that he was knocking chunks of plaster off their walls. It shot iron balls the size of big marbles, and the black powder sent up clouds of smoke. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill somebody. Ellen was the only one who could wrangle the bunch of you, which is why I moved her up from the kitchen to the nursery. She could soothe you all to sleep at night and reason with you during the day to make you mind her. At most, if she was really mad, she would snatch you boys up by your collars onto your tiptoes to get your attention. I was never good at reasoning with children. I either gave hugs and kisses or impatient swats on the bottom.

James looks at his notebook and says, It’s so much, seeing all these names together. So many children passed on. I can’t imagine.

—Yes, I still sometimes hear those slow drumbeats, V says. Dirt clods striking small coffin lids muffled with straw. I grieved, of course. When Samuel died, I couldn’t leave the house for two or three months. But he was my first and only child then. Later, deaths fell differently because living children need so much from you, and you can’t indulge yourself and collapse into grief. Like with Joe—six weeks later Winnie arrived. Unless you’re just worthless, you get up and put on the black dress and keep going.