Varina(40)

MORNINGS, V AND PEMBERTON SAT under the big live oak in the yard and talked plans for the day as they drank coffee. Sometimes it would be plowing or planting or maintenance of buildings or roads or wagons and harness, the care of sick horses. Or that people needed pantaloons, dozens of pairs at a time, which V sewed herself. Or that someone’s Auntie had died and it would be good to cook a pig for the funeral. Then in the evenings she and Pemberton would sit under the tree as the light dimmed and the air cooled to recapitulate the successes and failures of the day. This went on and on.

Pemberton very closely matched her father’s age, but after a year of daily discussions, V realized she knew him better than her father, and vice versa. She was not so young that she didn’t recognize the position he occupied—stuck in the center of a triangle between Jeff, Joe, V. And of course she knew she occupied the weak corner. But with careful calibration of power and distance and affection, Pemberton took care of her as if she mattered to him.

Sometimes in the evening after the daily business of running Brierfield had concluded, V would ask Pemberton about Jeff when he was young. Day after day she picked away, asking questions about West Point and the time afterward on the frontier, about Jeff’s life as a young man and about his first wife.


PEMBERTON WOULD HAVE BEEN forty-five or fifty during the Mexican War. Built solid and fairly tall, the gray in his hair mixed evenly, about 30 percent. Like several slaves on The Hurricane and Brierfield, he was literate, and he particularly liked newspapers, so V saved him the Memphis and New Orleans papers as they came up or down the river on steamboats several days after publication.

He started out wary of telling her anything about Knoxie to the point it was hard to glean from his comments that he ever knew her.

He’d say safe things like, After Mister Davis finished up school, we went to the north country and stayed an awful long time. We had cold winters at West Point, but up there toward the top of the river, winters kept on going until you worried the back of one and the front of the next might meet in the middle with no summer at all. He said, Winters, everything freezes up there. You could walk across the river. Play Jesus. It was awful weather.

But after he realized V knew a few things about Jeff’s courtship of Knoxie—had visited her grave as a solemn honeymoon event and knew her death had wounded Jeff perhaps beyond healing—Pemberton talked more openly, though still only in snips and hints. She could tell Pemberton had liked Knoxie but didn’t want to say it. And when V thought about it, his favorable opinion of Knoxie carried some weight. She had previously pictured Knoxie as a little half-pretty, sharp-eyed belle—decorated in every fluffy feature of that season’s fashion—showing up in the middle of nowhere with her commanding-officer daddy and being as single-minded and witless in her search for a husband among the young officers as a hen pecking at cracked corn.

So V held back awhile on direct questions about Knoxie and went another direction. She made Pemberton awfully uncomfortable one sundown when she said, I’ve heard Jeff may have fathered an Indian baby up there. Some claim to know for sure it was a girl.

She told Pemberton that people in Washington gossiped about it, and that she needed to know how to help Jeff handle the gossip, and that how to do it best would be different, depending on whether the story was true or untrue. She reminded Pemberton that managing social matters wasn’t where Jeff’s light shined brightest—which everyone who ever spent thirty seconds with him knew for a fact.

Pemberton said, Ma’am, some things up the river back then’s not for us to cover here between us.

V reminded him that when they sat under the tree at sunset, just the two of them talking, neither of them needed to worry about forms of salutation that slowed them down. Just talk the way he and Jeff usually talked. Not necessary to say sir or ma’am every other sentence. Just talk straight.

—I don’t know anyone else to ask about this, V added. And besides, I was about one year old at the time, and he was a grown man on the wild frontier and very spirited.

Pemberton said, Mr. Davis ought to be the one answering your question.

V paused and then said, I’ll take it that the rumors of a child are true. Otherwise, you’d deny them. And I appreciate that you’re not going to lie to me.

—No, ma’am.

—Did you know the mother?

—She was . . . He trailed off, waved his hands in front of him.

—Let me guess. Pretty and seventeen? The way he likes us.

—Her daddy was supposed to be from England, Pemberton said, as deflection. Anyway, she was light brown color and could speak good English, but it sounded funny. A part-Sauk girl by her looks. Most folks up there were Sauk or Fox, and a few Dakota Sioux from on out West. I knew her half sister some. Real, real pretty woman. They had the same mama, but that sister sure had plenty of Sioux in her.

—Meaning what? V said.

—Hard to say. Sioux were real strong fighters.

Pemberton said it like a soft, happy memory.

—I forgot you were a young man too back then, V said.

Pemberton looked off toward the river. He stood and said, I believe I’ll go down to the horse barn before it’s too dark to see my hand in front of my face and make sure Jack is set for the night.

Jack was V’s saddle horse and had been moving a little off in front the previous couple of days.

—Check his feet, V said.