Varina(58)
The tea was herbal, a sinus-clearing mixture that made a nice greenish-yellow cup. One of the girls set out a platter of cold breakfast biscuits cut into triangles and drizzled with honey and sprinkled with some brown spice similar to cinnamon but more piney.
By way of transition, V pulled her pistol out of her reticule. It rested in her hand so small and inconsequential compared to their heavy Colt’s army revolvers. V’s lay there unthreatening, prettier than it needed to be for its function. And too, at least while in her possession, it had killed no one. Hard to reconcile these lovely girls with Missus Wiggins’s statement that everyone in the family had killed at least one human being.
—This is a gift from my husband, V said. He meant me to kill myself with it if I found myself on the brink of being dishonored.
They all looked at the little thing, and then one of the girls said, Did he understand how a gun works? Somebody comes at you, you point it at them, not yourself.
—Well, V said, I always planned on using it your way, no matter what his intentions were.
They sipped tea a moment, and then V said, I understand this has been a hard time.
The girl who looked oldest—meaning maybe seventeen—said, They didn’t come marching across Georgia as one big army all together. They fanned out sixty or a hundred miles wide in little bunches of raiders. Sometimes only a few men, but one time more than a dozen. And then thieves and scavengers followed them. First bunch—four of them—it was clear you let them do what they wanted and take what they wanted or they would burn you out and leave you wandering the roads. Say one thing they didn’t like, they might go wild and slaughter everybody. But Billy reached real fast and yanked away one of their Henry rifles and started working it. Six seconds later we were all standing around in a cloud of gun smoke trying to catch our breaths, watching those soldiers finish dying.
—After that, there wasn’t any luck to it, one of the younger girls said. We had a plan. Of course if there had ever been thirty of them at one time or if just one got away to tell what happened to the rest, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking.
—They made us choose, the older girl said. Them or us.
The youngest girl, very pale, her hair loose below her shoulders, said, Yes, that’s the choice we made. Us.
One of the girls poured more of the herb tea and V looked around the dim parlor. Heart pine floors and pine wainscoting and pine plank ceilings. Yet it displayed flairs of decor. Many wide dark picture frames surrounded small watercolors, each one composed of three horizontal bands of color grading up from beige to green to blue, representing the only landscape they knew. Bits of needlework, antimacassars and tabletop doilies in patterns like overlapped leaves or explosions of flower petals or diagrams of mental geometry representing the physics of existence way into the depths of the night sky. Three dozen precious well-read leather books stood on a shelf over the fireplace. Milton and Shakespeare, Dickens and Trollope and Scott, and translations of random Greeks and Romans. And one volume which, when V pulled it off the shelf, turned out to be actual Greek, a collection of lyric poets.
By way of trying to prove the nonextinction of ladies she translated a few lines on the fly. The girls crowded around. Very slowly, pointing word by word, V read, The moon sets. Then the Pleiades. Midnight. Time goes away. I am alone.
When she closed the book they all applauded, as if she had just performed an amazing magic trick in reverse, starting with a sawed-in-half lady and putting her back together. They all talked at once asking how she knew the code to reading that strange book of runes. Their voices rose like a bird chorus floating lovely in V’s mind without every note needing to carry a specific definition. She told them about Winchester, how much he taught her for no reason but his devotion to learning and for no compensation but her eternal love.
It would have been easy to dismiss their efforts toward culture as laughable, crude similitudes and dislocations. Proximate at best. But where did the Greeks start? With fundamentals. Sheep and olives and grapes, white stones and dark blue sea. The moon and planets in the night sky and willing spirits—which these girls had aplenty. Smart, pretty girls with guns.
V was as touched as they were by such welcome company. Their yearning she recognized fully from that age, the need to become something at least within the vicinity of your dream of yourself. She looked at that quartet of lifted faces and wished each of them something better than the man they would most probably find themselves bound to till death—even if that something better was solitude. She shaped a ragged philosophy to tide them through lonesome nights. It was simple, and not one she’d ever found the strength to follow. The idea was, the you you are with others is not you. To be lonesome is to be who you most fully are. And also maybe something about the great reluctance with which we let go of our belief in a just God.
When she finished talking she feared she had said too many of those things aloud. Or all of those things and more. The girls looked at her in some confusion, but excited and willing to consider and discuss the merits of her comments. V looked at Missus Wiggins to gauge her reaction, and Missus Wiggins reached and touched her hand very briefly in reassurance, so the girls and V talked on and on.
Despite being unable to keep their names straight, V fell in love with them all and wanted to take them with her, load them and their weapons into the wagons and have conversations around campfires every night until late as they made their way deep into the jungles of Terra Florida and through the horrors of its reptiles and outlaw inhabitants and across the Straits of Florida to safety in old civilized Havana.