Varina(43)



The news of Pemberton hit V hard—deeper than she would have thought. She couldn’t stop feeling guilty that she hadn’t been there for his burial, couldn’t stop remembering how he had tried to divert Joseph’s rage, couldn’t stop feeling exposed and at risk knowing he was gone. But she kept her feelings tamped, since no one—especially Jeff—would understand her grief for Pemberton. There wasn’t a vocabulary to explain their relationship to other people.

*

—There still aren’t words now, V says.

—But you could try. It sounds like Pemberton protected you the best he could when you didn’t have anyone else on your side.

—That’s exactly the way it was. And when he died it felt almost like Winchester had passed. Like a father had gone for good, but I couldn’t say that.

She thinks a moment and then says, I don’t know why, but I remember one evening Pemberton telling me he wouldn’t be around for a day or two. That he was going to visit a man he knew—an old friend—on a plantation twenty miles away. He said he’d gotten word the man had been beaten badly because after he’d groomed a horse his master had wiped a white handkerchief down its neck and it came back dirty. I was so young. I mostly felt happy that he trusted me enough to tell me where he was going and why. I told him I’d never been around those horrors and always felt like they were mostly stories. He said, It’s not one thing everywhere. People act their natures. Some plantations beat bloody every chance they get. Other places a man can go off two or three days to visit a girlfriend miles away, and when he gets back the master just says, I thought you’d fallen in the river and drowned.

—Yes, James says. I heard plenty of true stories from freed people when I first started teaching. A little kindness and a lot of horror. My first real job as a teacher—making my living at it—I was nineteen. A student of mine—she’d been enslaved in Maryland. She was about fifty, just learning to read. Her name was Martha.

James tells V that Martha was body servant to a young mistress who trusted her and chattered at length every day, telling every dirty secret about her disgusting older husband, every flirtation she had with handsome younger men at parties, her occasional adulterous flings, every thread of gossip in the county. Martha dressed her mistress every day from bare skin to composed belle—arranged her hair, applied powder and rouge, told her how beautiful she was. And yet the mistress sold Martha’s ten-year-old daughter to traders for seven hundred dollars. She believed Martha would get over her crying and forget about the girl, and Martha did get over the crying because she had to. But she told James that not one day of her life passed without grieving for her daughter, and wondering which was worse, believing her child dead or imagining the fate that might have awaited her. And still every day having to touch with care the woman who inflicted such pain.

—Inhuman, V says. But that’s an easy word. We’ve been doing that sort of thing to each other all through history, back past the Pyramids. Humans are inhuman, whether it’s by direct action or by acceptance of a horrible action as normal.

—That godlike long view is fine. Sometimes we need it. But hearing a story like Martha’s made me want to kill somebody right then. James pauses and then says, Anyway, let’s circle back to what you call the axle of your life. Maybe the axle of mine too—when all that old order was in the middle of collapsing.





Writing on the Wall


1865


AFTER THEIR MOMENT OF LUXURY IN ABBEVILLE, THE fugitives traveled west, crossed the Savannah River into Georgia. The town of Washington, Georgia, had once been pretty, but it had filled with refugees fleeing north from Sherman’s wasteland. Garbage in the streets, stores looted. V’s group kept right on going and spent the night in a little white country chapel, sleeping on the pews. Then through a stretch of beautiful broken country, slow going for a whole week. Wet weather and bad roads. Then they fell off the map for three days of greenwood country and tangles of curvy single-track, seven or eight miles a day at best, but pretty camp places. Not mountains, but low ridges, water running over big rocks in the streams. Little towns blurred together, but V remembers a place called Mayfield. She wanted to stop and buy a house and let the children grow up there.


DELREY AND BURTON AND JIMMIE LIMBER never owned their tiredness. Go twelve hours with little food and no rest, banging down the rutted roads dazed and numb, and then ask them if they were ready to stop for the night and they’d each say, I could keep going awhile. Like having a contest to see who could persist, who fell in his footsteps last.

—You tired, little man? Delrey said. Fading? Do we need to stop?

Jimmie said, Nope. I can go.

V said, Delrey, are you hinting you could use a nap? Jimmie can probably figure out how to drive this rig if he needs to.

Delrey said, I believe he could if he had a little teaching.

Jimmie looked far down the road and said nothing.

Delrey widened and lifted his arms, spreading the long drooping leather reins, and said, Come here and spell me, then.

Jimmie looked at V, and she nodded yes. He ducked under and stood in front of Delrey and took hold of the reins. The backs of his hands were still childhood chubby to the extent that the knuckles at the base of his fingers were like four dimples in his plump handbacks. The reins were wide as his palms.

—Guide ’em easy, Delrey said. Don’t pull, and don’t flap. They have plenty of sense on their own. Use the reins to make suggestions. Don’t go yanking and checking them unless they give you no other choice. Got it?

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