Varina(57)

—Sir, Delrey said, I would like to introduce Mrs. Anthony Thomas. The lady I mentioned earlier. However I don’t know your name to make a proper introduction.

The boy took his eyes off V and Delrey and twitched his attention toward his father for half a second and then right back at them.

The father said, My name is Mister Wiggins.

Delrey said, Mrs. Thomas, permit me to introduce Mister Wiggins.

—Ma’am, Wiggins said.

He wore no hat to lift and sort of dipped his head toward her an inch. A vestigial bow.

V said, Mister Wiggins, I believe you know of our circumstances, and I didn’t want you to trouble yourself with our difficulties. We all have more than enough responsibility in taking care of our own families.

—Amen, the boy said.

The father let his rifle down and stood its butt against the porch boards. The boy, though, kept alert. There was a good deal of killer about him, and it was why he still lived. The last four years had made a whole generation of young boys—who ought to have been going to school and learning a trade and thrilling deep in their bones just to dance with a girl and peck her on the cheek—into slit-eyed killers with no more tell of emotion than an old riverboat faro gambler.

V climbed down from the ambulance bench and walked toward the porch.

She said, Could I possibly speak a word or two with the lady of the house?

—With who? Wiggins said.

—Your wife? A word, please?

—What purpose?

—Politeness? What but manners do we have left?

Wiggins looked at the boy, but the boy just kept flicking his attention between V and Delrey and Bristol and Ryland. He held his rifle balanced scalelike in his hands, measuring its weight to be ready to lift it fast and fire.

Wiggins said, A minute, please, Missus Thomas.

He went to the door and spoke something inside, and a slim woman walked out and down the steps.

She wore a cotton dress laundered almost thin as gauze. The fabric might have been a sort of milky chocolate at one time, patterned with leaves or flowers. Now it looked like parchment marked with script too faint to read. She carried a heavy black pistol, and she looked young to be mother to five. Pretty in an exhausted way. Much as V imagined herself to look, having birthed one more than Mrs. Wiggins, and really the dead ones batter you even more than the living, pull more out of you in their leaving than their arriving.

When they were close enough to speak softly, V said, Missus Wiggins, are you and your daughters all right?

Missus Wiggins lifted her left hand and wiped the prominent second knuckle of the forefinger three swipes against the wings of her nose and then swept her loose and mostly brown hair back from her forehead with the inside angle of her elbow.

—All right? she said. If we’re not, where could we go to be right? And what would we live on when we got there? Just breathe air and be fine? I’m not standing here to be judged by you or anybody else.

—I only meant . . .

—God hates lies, and I’m not going to tell one to you. We’re not any of us all right. We’re all about half crazy since the raiders started passing through. Wiggins and I didn’t carry slaves. Didn’t believe in them, and didn’t want them. Believed there would be a bloody reckoning for them, and we were right. We hoed our own rows, emptied our own night jars, cooked our own meals, taught our children to read, and when we could spare the money, we bought them books too hard for us to read. Our goal was simple. If every generation helps the next take one step up, imagine where we might all be someday. But those boys from the Northern army came after us anyway. Six or a dozen at a time in waves for weeks. Trying to take what they could carry and burn the rest. If we had a choice but to let them kill us or to put them down, I can’t see it. Every one of us killed at least a person, and two of the girls can’t lift the blame off themselves. They dream about it no matter how I tell them the load’s on those boy soldiers for their own dying. And on the old men who sent them here. You turn the other cheek too many times in this world, and before you can blink you’re wiped away. We didn’t go out to steal everything they had and burn their farms to ashes. They came here, and they stayed here. I’m sorry they believed whatever they believed about us that made it right to come try to kill us. They’re thirty-one of them. They don’t have markers, but we all went out in the pines to put them in the ground and say sad words over them about their delusions.

The pistol hung from her hand, pulling her down, a burden heavier than she could bear. The other women, all in their teens, hovered behind the front door and the flanking windows, watching. V pictured dark woods, a crescent moon riding across a deep indigo sky, a dark night procession of pretty girls and tall dogs lit by yellow pine-knot torches, tangled bodies of bloody young men heaped in a wagon-bed.

V said, Could I come inside and meet your girls?


THEY WERE INDEED PRETTY and strange and might have fallen from Venus for all they knew of the current outside world. They lined up to meet V, a receiving line. They were all the same size, and V imagined a common pile of worn and faded dresses from before the war—every morning each girl just drawing something from the pile without thought of possession or personal style. They had names along the lines of flowering plants and tragic heroines. Names like Daisy and Daphne and Laurel and Hecuba, though V couldn’t keep any of them straight. The girls flurried around preparing an afternoon tea, carrying their pistols and then setting them down on every horizontal surface in a percussive four-beat rhythm.