Varina(42)

ALL THE YEARS LATER, living in the twentieth century, she’s taken care of herself long enough to know how it’s done. What she wanted at twenty-one was either to have the security promised as part of the deal when marrying an older man of property, or else to be left alone to live her life without some master like Old Joe lording over her.

Jeff, though, wanted peace at home and power out in the world. He got the latter almost immediately without even having to go through an election when one of Mississippi’s old senators died in office, as they often do. War hero Jeff was immediately appointed to the position by the governor. As Jeff prepared to leave for Washington, he gave V a choice. Go along with Joe’s system of management and accompany her husband to Washington, or carry on the fight and stay right there at the Bend by herself.

It was a mean ultimatum, knowing how much she loved Washington and that the wife of a senator would have even more access to the best parties and the most interesting people. They had mostly lived apart for the past two years, and if V didn’t agree to Jeff’s terms, they would spend most of another year separated. V decided to dig in and fight on, besieged at Fort Brierfield.


GRIM TIMES AFTER JEFF LEFT. Letters passed between them declaring love but ending in threats. He urged her to become less bitter toward his family and declared that if her behavior didn’t change, it would be impossible ever to live together again. She sent back letters suggesting maybe that would be for the best.

She thought for a while about getting a puppy for company, a warm body to snuggle with when she stayed up late reading. But eventually she decided that at the Bend it would grow to be some vicious hunting dog chasing deer to exhaustion and death.

At Jeff’s insistence, Joseph’s horrible patched-on wing finally rose from the ground, and a very worn and bleak woman with four insane children moved in. Even the hour of supper became so full of running and screaming and crying that V began taking her evening meal alone in her room or out at the table under the big tree. But she kept fighting Jeff and Brother Joe and the damned will all along the way.


JEFF HAD A HARD TIME alone in Washington, and it wasn’t just that he lacked social skills. He nearly got into a duel with a mere congressman, and it took his old father-in-law—now President Zachary Taylor—to calm the two men. Then shortly afterward, on Christmas Day, Jeff and his fellow senator from Mississippi, Henry Foote—both living at Brown’s Hotel—fell into disagreement on either a political or a Constitutional issue. Jeff forever remained too embarrassed to talk about it, but V heard in letters from acquaintances and friends that he and Foote had been drinking pretty strongly from breakfast onward. Jeff, who still walked with a cane, began fistfighting Foote, a rolling-in-the-floor kind of fight. When they became winded and stood up, they threatened to kill one another for a while, and then on his way out of the room, Foote turned around and claimed he was the one who struck the first blow. Then Jeff got right in his face, and they threatened to kill one another all over again until Foote struck Jeff, and then Jeff knocked Foote to the floor and beat on him until the other members of the legislative branch dragged them apart. At which point Jeff, very cold-blooded, said he had two loaded pistols in his room and suggested they go up and lock the door from the inside and settle the matter for good. Foote declined. A few days later, when the event became public, both of them—politicians to the marrow—agreed to call their brawl a Christmas frolic, a regrettable celebration of the Savior’s birth.

V didn’t know what all was going on with Jeff at that time and didn’t much care. But letters kept coming from friends sharing gossip—such as, that in the middle of the night, probably drunk, he had fallen off a bridge or down a bank into a ditch and limped around the Capitol for a week with his head and hands wrapped in white bandages. Their own letters to each other remained icy during that entire session, but it seemed clear Jeff needed a steadying hand.

At a long break in the congressional calendar, Jeff came to his senses and arrived back home with a draft of a new agreement among the three warring parties. A treaty wherein Joseph saved face and V got a true stake in Davis Bend should Jeff die ahead of her, with Joseph having a right to make the first offer to buy her share should she want to sell out. An entertaining negotiation to anticipate—V having something Joe wanted and the power to say no—which regrettably never came to pass, since she has far outlived both brothers.

When Jeff and V left together for the next session of Congress, V never again lived at Brierfield for more than a few weeks at a time. But the night after the signing of the peace papers, Jeff opened a couple of bottles of old Bordeaux and made a ceremony of burning the previous will in the bedroom fireplace, and V felt like the second half of an incomplete wedding had finally been performed, that for better or worse they were linked and committed and that she had become a full shareholder in her own future.

Gossips speculated as to why Jeff and V went years without her bearing a child and then suddenly she seemed to stay pregnant most of the time. It didn’t seem mysterious to V, and that second will and second wedding ceremony by the fire had a great deal to do with it, a reconciliation of hearts and bodies that lasted for some years.


THE RETURN TO WASHINGTON would have seemed triumphant to V, except that soon after they arrived news came from the Bend that Pemberton had died very unexpectedly. Jeff hardly spoke of Pemberton’s death, but he brooded for a few days and then just said, I don’t know which of us hated that north woods weather the most.