Varina(41)
—Been planning on it, ma’am, Pemberton said as he walked away.
V sat outside past full dark imagining thousands of half-blood children like Jeff’s Sauk girl and Pemberton’s Sioux girl, entering that strange liminal world of native villages and invader forts and tallgrass plains and dark fir forests under conditions ranging from rape to rapturous love. Maybe the Sauk girl’s particular Brit father was a tallish blond fourth son, Cambridge educated but adventurous and looking to make his own fortune at a far and alien fringe of the New World. And he lingered almost a decade after the birth of his pretty daughter before fleeing onward toward the Pacific or backing away toward home. During those years he stayed, the girl became fluent in English. So Jeff arrives in the wilderness—winter, dark, cold—land cut in two by the Mississippi, which seemed not at all the same river that flowed wide and brown by Natchez. And he meets this girl and an old story only worth summarizing comes to pass. Two young people meet at that moment of accelerative emotion when nature floods our being with urgent demands. So, assume the usual plot elements—attractiveness, proximity, opportunity. She speaks a highly grammatical but oddly accented English, a matter of enunciation for the most part, a carefulness of the tongue in forming certain vowels that creates a music Jeff finds irresistible. Also assume variations on the usual narrative details, their differing clothes and social ranking and halting manners toward each other, the brief yearning and the quick consummation, including an oblique reference to the mechanics of reproduction. And then months later . . . what? No telling whether Jeff considered his next action as moving on or backing away.
V was tempted to spin her imagination on and on about the adventures and loves of Jefferson and Pemberton in the wilderness, but she resolved to pause her deductions and inventions and give all that north woods material a name and put it away for a while like a rough draft. Title it something like Jefferson on the Wild Frontier, or Reckless Love, or simply Knoxie.
A week later, though, she found a bundle of letters from Jeff’s courtship with Knoxie in a desk drawer. They’d been tied with a red ribbon. V didn’t read them, not that day nor thereafter. Their words to each other were not her business, but she assumed Jeff’s letters followed his usual heart-throbbing pattern, plunging headlong into French at the end.
At seventeen V had been young and romantic enough to believe that, given time, she could occupy and eventually possess all the chambers of Jeff’s heart—or at least a majority of them. But even during the Mexican War she had already started to wonder if Knoxie’s spirit would hover between them, a beautiful ectoplasmic projection, throughout their marriage.
THE MEXICAN WAR DRAGGED ON, and so did the war between Brierfield and The Hurricane. Politics and diplomacy between the two plantations became so bleak that Jeff asked for leave to make an epic journey, a thousand miles, to forge peace at home. His commanding officer was once again Knoxie’s father, Zachary Taylor, a general at the time. In Mexico, Jeff and the general became friends, and Taylor allowed that between them his daughter had been the better judge of young men. He sent Jeff off with his blessings to do what needed to be done in Mississippi.
Jeff traveled by horseback from Monterey to the coast and then by ship across the northern Gulf to New Orleans and then by steamboat up the river to the Bend. He showed up with blood in his eyes, mad equally at V and Brother Joe. During the three weeks Jeff stayed at Brierfield, he and V fought nightly over the will—its surprises and secrets, the unimagined complications of property ownership, her lack of any inheritance or protections against the future. He spent most of every day huddled with Old Joe in his office conspiring about how to deal with her.
When Jeff’s leave ran out, Brierfield and The Hurricane had failed to reach a peace treaty, or even a cease-fire. He left V with a chilly peck on her cheek on the porch, and V did not join him in the carriage to see him off at the dock. From Jeff’s arrival until his departure, she slept in a separate bedroom. She told him that the crudest way to put it was that if he died in Mexico—leaving her to the predations of Joseph—she intended to save herself for her second husband. Whatever grim transaction a second marriage might involve, dragging a child into the negotiations would be an unwelcome impediment. Or, leaving future husbands out of it, imagine her bed and board entirely in the hands of Old Joe, and Jeff’s child equally without inheritance so long as Joe kept the deed to Brierfield.
Just as he turned to leave, V said to him, How can I bring children into the world knowing the brutal, mercantile family they would fall into, holding money over all our heads to control us? Old Joe already controls so many destinies, his houseful of women and fields full of slaves.
All Jeff could say in response was, I think you’re exaggerating.
AFTER A STRETCH OF WEEKS ALONE, V wrote to her mother, I have become quite a savage, and I tear my food in silence.
A FEW MONTHS BEFORE the end of the Mexican War, Jeff came home wounded and walking with a cane—the great hero of the Battle of Buena Vista, where his strategy and leadership and courage would enter the canon of military history. In Natchez, they rode together through town in an open carriage heaped to their armpits with flowers. All the way up from New Orleans, in every town, brass bands and dignitaries and barbecues and salutes of guns and cannons welcomed them.
Jeff hid his true pain to the extent that his limp seemed a theatrical affectation and the cane a fashion accessory. All along the way, he made speeches to the crowds. Stop by stop as they moved upriver he grew more confident and more powerful as a speaker. One newspaper said that if he ran for the Senate he would go through the state like a bolt of lightning. But settled back at Brierfield, it became clear how badly he had been injured. Pieces of bone kept working themselves out of his wounds, and the fight with Brother Joe weighed heavy on his mind. He wanted V to play along, leave everything for Joseph to sort out someday. Trust him. But there Jeff was, his foot and lower leg wounded to the marrow, and V picking bone shards out of the mess every morning with tweezers, knowing any day it could go septic and carry him away to the next world.