Varina(5)

V tells James how her children had died, scattered from New York to Washington to Richmond to Memphis, but had been dug up and dragged to Richmond to surround their father’s monument. And of course Jeff was dug up from New Orleans and dragged there too. Even before he was dead yet, businessmen and governments from Georgia and Kentucky and Mississippi and Virginia tried to offer her deals for possession of the body when the time came. Bragging how they would make his obelisk taller and grander than Washington’s. And that’s not even factoring the money they offered her to seal the deal. But a hill in Hollywood Cemetery above the James River seemed the right choice, seasoned with the irony that she hated Richmond because it was where they met their apocalypse. And because Joe already waited by himself down the green hill.

Soon, she will be hauled there too, not that she cares one way or the other about graves. She imagines a little flat paving stone the dimensions of a shoe-box lid without even a name—just WIFE & MOTHER and a bracket of dates. Every sunny day, the shadow of his tall statue will cross over her like the gnomon of a sundial, like a blade.

—One thing I am sure of, though, V says to James. I’ll never return to Richmond until it’s feetfirst in a box.

*

Jimmie Limber came to the back of the wagon seat and reached to put a hand on V’s arm. Not a word, just a touch—at which, she helped him climb over and sat him next to her and pulled him against her by his bony shoulder.

She said, Jimmie, do you need something?

—Nope. Can’t sleep.

—Cold?

—Nope.

—Not scared, are you?

—I don’t scare.

—Of course not, V said.

—Just want to watch the road.

Delrey said, I hope you can see it better than I can, Jimmie. We’ve run off into the pines three times already tonight. The mules can’t tell woods and cornfields from road much better than I can.

—I see real good, Jimmie said.

—Well, V said.

—Yes, ma’am. Real well.

He watched down the road awhile and then said, Mighty dark to travel.

V said, We’re deep in the world here, Jimmie.

He sat with her arm draped across his shoulders. If she tried to hug him too long he squirmed, but sometimes he rested his head against her, breathing deep but always awake and watching.

—I believe the road’s about to bear left, he’d say. Long straightaway coming after a creek crossing. Might be a burned-out house after that. I can smell it.

He predicted little better than Delrey or the mules or V did, which is to say about like blind chance. But he tried hard.

Jimmie said, How far is it we’re going?

V said, A hundred miles, and then a hundred miles more. Who knows how many times after that? Maybe a boat trip somewhere along the way. You boys will enjoy that.

—Keep going till we stop?

—Can you do that, Jimmie?

He thought about it a long time and then said, I’ll try it.

V said, If you’ll watch out for me, I’ll watch out for you.

He stuck out his hand to shake on the deal. Little clammy palm.

V shook and then said, A kiss on the cheek too.

He turned his head and angled his cheek for a kiss.

She said, No, I meant you kiss me.

She turned her cheek, and he made a quick peck.

An hour before dawn started showing in the sky, Jimmie Limber faded away to sleep and V held him against her with both arms awhile for her own benefit and then lifted him back to the fragrant tick mattress and patchwork quilts with the others. Under the canvas, their bedding cast an odor of overripe fruit, though they’d had no fruit for weeks, unless you counted half-rotted winter squash.

V dissolved pinches of Dover’s into a metal cup with a splash of red wine. She wanted to time it so the opium rose in her with the dawn. Both coming on in gradations of blue and gray like a bruise swelling above the pines.


LA FLORIDA. V sat on the wagon bench and looked down the road like it might appear around the next bend. Her mind kept circling back to when she was seventeen—two decades ago—wondering how she got from there to here. Thinking how all the lesser increments of time between then and now—years, months, days, hours, moments—drained constantly into the black sump where time resides after it’s been used up, whether used well or squandered.

A part of her believed this one moment—Carolina woods, a wagonload of children, lights of heaven blazing on a clear spring night—was sufficient. An eternity in itself. A perfect instant if you erased guilt of the past and dread of the future. One key lay in not weighing the many impending threats and losses against grand past moments left behind, diminishing by the mile. Just breathe night air, listen to owls hoot, and be happy while it lasts. The dead are dead. Be happy for a wagonload of live children.

Glory aplenty through those past couple of decades, though. Several presidents—mostly dead now—thinking she was awfully pretty and smart and witty. That first stretch of time in Washington, she’d been eighteen, new wife of shiny new congressman Jeff, and thrilled to go to parties at the Polk White House and write her mother comic letters about how everyone dressed and how short and inconsequential Polk looked.

Another time, during her second era in Washington—so V was midtwenties and wife of the secretary of war—President Pierce walked alone from the real White House in a whirling snowstorm and knocked at the door and came in frosted top to bottom. He wore a heavy blue wool coat, military style with tall collars standing up to the tops of his ears. He lacked a hat, and his hair—usually a wavy voluminous mess—drooped slick and wet against the sides of his skull like the ears of a spaniel fresh from the water. He had been drinking as usual and stood in the foyer taking his coat off, apologizing for the puddle of snowmelt around his boots.