Varina(56)

Back at the caravan V said to Burton, We need a huge pot of greens, any kind you can find.

—Yes?

—And meat to flavor the pot. We all need it. We’re starting to look pasty as corpses from traveling and living too much on white food. Biscuits and grits and flour gravy.

She multiplied people, counting children as half a person, figuring at least a quart per person for a good strong dose of greens and meat broth.

She said, We’ll need about three bushels of greens. A couple of chickens or a pound of bacon or ham will do for the broth.


THREE HOURS LATER, Delrey and Bristol and Ryland came back from foraging with comically big tow sacks paired behind their saddles. The bags bulged with various cresses and mustards and a great deal of dandelion and dock and plantain, even a few beautiful fiddleheads and wild leeks. But no meat, not even a skinny squirrel.

—I found a place with aplenty of hogs, Delrey said. This man’s shaped his farm like a fort. Long pine logs axed to a point on either end and piled onto each other in a jagged circle with the hogs and the smokehouse and a pretty, white farmhouse in the middle of it. Like he’s trying to live inside a brier-patch. He’s got a pack of big dogs. The dogs and the hogs are all brown and black and some of them wear their colors in spots and some go striped, and all of them are so long-legged you have to get up close to tell the difference. I tried to buy some hog meat off him, but he wasn’t selling. The man said he and his one boy and four daughters and wife have an arsenal of weapons and ammunition they’ve taken off of Sherman’s raiders. Two Henry repeating rifles for the man and his son, and a bunch of Colt’s pistols and shotguns for the women. Said they took the rifles off the first band of raiders and then used them afterward to pour down fire on every bunch that came to steal their food and burn them out. The boy looks about fifteen and very chilly. The man said the boy is God-almighty fast and can empty the Henry’s magazine in twenty seconds and can hit anything he can see without really aiming. That’s near a shot a second. Said all seven members of the family share one mind. They stand ready to fight anybody—North or South—coming to take what’s theirs until one side or the other meets their fate right there in the hog yard.

—Is he just blowing? V said.

—He means it, ma’am, Delrey said. And two good marksmen firing from cover with Henry rifles can take down a right smart of men fast, so I don’t fully doubt the story he told. I said to him that we had no intention of robbing him or burning him out. Said we were traveling with a lady and children and they were hungry. The farmer said he didn’t believe ladies existed in the world anymore. Or God either. But he said if we could produce one or the other of them at his fortress and prove him wrong he’d give us an entire smoked ham and send us on our way with his blessing.

—A ham? V said.

—Yes, and you could smell the smokehouse from where we stood talking. Like cooking bacon in a greasy skillet over a campfire. But that man’s about crazy, and I don’t believe we need a ham bad enough to deal with him.

V looked around at the children, at Ellen and the thin navy boys still traveling along. How sickly they looked. She said, Delrey, I believe you lack confidence in our evidence.

—Ma’am?

—Proof that ladies have not gone extinct.

—No, ma’am, not at all. But I will say that Richmond’s a long way back and we’ve all been living rough for a while now. Of course, this is Georgia, and who knows what standards they go by.

—Delrey, is there a state with standards you know and approve?

—Not any I’ve been to.

—I do take your point, about rough traveling, though. Give me twenty minutes to clean up and change clothes, and trowel on a great deal of powder, and then you and I will take the ambulance and go out to this fortress and give it a try. The navy boys should follow along with us. An entire smoked ham and those beautiful greens you found would be a feast for all of us. And plenty of ham biscuits later.


MOTTLED COON HOUNDS BAWLED at their approach with such force that V worried they would rupture a lung. But the nearer she got the more they backed away from the horses and hung near the porch, ready to retreat into the dark underneath.

She pushed the palm of her hand toward them and said, Bad dogs.

The dogs walked angling away, looking at her side-eyed.

She said, Good dogs.

They came forward with their tails wagging.

V said to Delrey, Just introduce me and then after that let me do all the talking. Do not use my real name.

Delrey nodded.

V looked at the boys.

—What? Ryland said.

—Simple, V said. Don’t say my name. I’ll do the talking. Yes?

—We’ve got it, Bristol said.

Ryland said, But what name should we call you?

—Just keep your mouths shut, Delrey said.


THE MAN AND HIS SON—a boy even younger than the navy boys but looking completely dead-eyed—came out the door with their Henry rifles cocked and angled down over their forearms, ready to lift and fire, but being polite about it. Beyond the doorframe and through the front windows, V saw women passing behind the two men, their much-washed homespun dresses ghostly in the brown light of the house, their drained faces and dark eyes glancing outward toward a larger world full of threat.

The man said, What’s all this, then?