Varina(55)

V—immediate and vehement—says, I cannot believe I’m sitting here having to listen to this. Having to explain. You’re a teacher. What’s a teacher’s pet? A favorite. Usually because they’re alert and present, smart and teachable, the ones who repay your effort five times over.

—A favorite little animal. It means that too.

—I won’t be responsible for your witnesses needing to apply skin color to every personal interaction. Strange to let that outer hundredth fraction of our bodies be so important. I’m guessing your Miss Botume was one of the people calling you my pet. Which way do you think those people meant the word?

—I’ll repeat something you said two weeks ago—you don’t need me to answer that question.

After a pause to regroup and redirect, James says, Hold out your arm, please.

V reaches it toward him.

James pulls back his sleeve and parallels his forearm to hers.

—See, V says, the difference is hardly more than which of us has been in the sun lately. Plus, I’ve faded with age.

—The difference is you’re white and I’m not. I don’t know what I am, and I’m never comfortable anywhere. I can’t remember a time when people—white and black—weren’t telling me how well I talk to white people. Both directions, they offer it as a compliment. But mostly it makes me feel separate.

—If you had been scooped off the streets of Richmond and taken straight to Paris at age four, you’d be good at talking to French people.

—That’s nowhere near an accurate analogy.

—No, it’s not.





Hog Fortress


1865


DOWN IN THE WASTELAND, CROSSING SHERMAN’S WAKE, the world had shut down. Loose coon dogs and bear dogs, half wild already, had started forming packs as soon as their owners scattered, leaving them to discover their own manners without interference from human opinions. V saw them hanging at the edges of dark pinewoods as her gang of fugitives rolled slowly down the roads south—bunches of dogs, yellow and brown and mottled, with their ribs showing and almost countable even from a distance, pink tongues hanging from desperate grins. Only a little more time—three seasons, V speculated—until all sense of man’s dominion over them would fade and they’d start taking down stray children and elder folks. Two or three dog generations after that, they’d go wholly wolf. Civilization balances always on a keen and precarious point, a showman spinning a fine Spode dinner plate on a long dowel slender as a stem of hay. A puff of breath, a moment’s lost attention, and it’s all gone, crashed to ruination, shards in the dirt. Then mankind retreats to the caves, leaving little behind but obelisks weathering to nubs like broken teeth, dissolving to beach sand.


IT HAPPENED RIGHT AFTER HARVESTTIME—Sherman’s raiders burned their way across Georgia. Corncribs full, fodder and forage stacked high in conical piles around eight-foot poles, apples all picked and stored fresh in root cellars for the fall or sun-dried in leathery rings for the winter. Onions and potatoes and turnips in root cellars, beans dried in the sun and ready for winter soup, cabbages still green in the fields almost ready for cutting. Fat hogs that you didn’t want to have to feed for the cold months ready to slaughter and feast on fresh or salt and smoke for later. A winter’s food wiped out and people left starving.

—Where did they all go? V asked as they passed a tiny ghost village surrounded by farms—only one house with light in the window, smoke coming from the chimney.

Delrey said, Somewhere else. Wandering refugee. Or off in the woods eating squirrels and grabbling trash fish out of creeks.


AT A RIVER FORD, a blond child sat alone on the far bank and shouted directions to them as they began crossing. Gee and haw. She claimed there were holes in the river widely known to be bottomless and able to pull down entire wagons and their teams.

When they reached dry land, V reached her out a few coins, but the girl looked at them and said, Ain’t nothing to buy around here. But if you’ve got clean water, I’ll pester you for a swallow of it. That river’s nasty. It’s got dead people in it, just laying there spoiling.

She tipped her head upstream.


MIDDAY, V WANDERED into the pinewoods for what all in their caravan delicately agreed to call a natural break. Men and women both scattered into the trees on opposite sides of the road, though the men only had to step casually behind a largish trunk a few feet from the roadbed and reappear a few seconds later looking at ease. V and Ellen trekked far beyond sight and had voluminous garments to deal with—awkward squatting and arising and so on.

Off in the woods in her moment of privacy, V thought about Winchester. He mostly taught mathematics by way of Euclid and Pythagoras. Winchester especially loved Pythagoras and his genius in understanding the ratios that order the universe, his declaration that number was God, and also his craziness otherwise, such as his rule that one should always answer the call of nature with back to sun, which was how V had aligned herself.

Walking back to the caravan, watching out for snakes, V plucked new growth from the center of a grassy plant, slid the innermost stalk of it free with a squeaky friction, a feel of suction. She put the white tip and the first pale green of the blade into her mouth like a farmer sucking on a wheat sprout. Her weed was an ugly nameless thing, except she believes that nothing is nameless. The weed’s bitter green beautiful taste carried with it an essential question. Will this thing help or hurt? Be medicine or poison? Thusly, the earliest herb doctors sounded out the world in endless experiment. How many thousands of generations cascaded down through time just to find the healing power in goldenseal or ginseng or coneflower root? But surely only three or four to note the poison in pokeberries or green parasols or false morels. The urge to graze in spring abides, the need for something green after a winter of dried beans and potato. Country people called spring greens a tonic. Medicine.