Varina(59)

But then came the immediate recognition that whatever V’s best intentions, these girls were safer here smothered under dim pinewoods inside their hog fortress than coming along with her to talk about poetry and beauty while big-dollar bounties hovered like a vortex of buzzards overhead. V’s contribution to their lives would likely be to drag them down darker than they already were. A sorry realization when you know the best you can offer is not your presence but your absence.


EVENTUALLY, V AND THE WIGGINS GIRLS all walked out of the house as a babbling group, talking over the top of each other about books they all intended to read and how much they loved each other. V promised that if she ever retrieved her library from Mississippi she would send them boxes and boxes of books.

They spent a great deal of time kissing cheeks and hugging and saying bye, including Missus Wiggins.

V pulled her aside and kissed her and said, You know these girls of yours are splendid?

Missus Wiggins said, I’ve been knowing it since they were old enough to stand up on their feet and talk for themselves.

Mister Wiggins had a bundle, a big awkward lump inside a greasy swaddling of hemp tow. A joint of yellowish bone stuck out the top in place of a handle.

He said, There’s a ham and a couple slabs of bacon to boot.

—So you’ve reached a favorable judgment as to the existence of ladies? V said.

—Ladies maybe. I’ve been listening at the window. But God’s still a great mystery.

—Yes, V said. Mystery is His primary attribute. But the pork is more than generous.

—Makes me happy to see my girls happy, Wiggins said.

Delrey gave V a hand into the ambulance and the navy boys mounted up and away they all went.

Still, the Wiggins boy stood on the porch watching intensely, his Henry balanced and ready to lift and fire.


AT THE FIRST BEND in the road Delrey said, So that’s the way ladies do?

—Good Lord no, V said. Not in the least.

They rode back to camp in silence, and V thought about how the landscape would never be the same after this war even if the blasted battlegrounds healed with new green growth and burned farms were either rebuilt or allowed to rot into the dirt. The old land had become all overlain with new maps of failures and sins, troop movements, battles and skirmishes, places of victory and defeat and loss and despair. Slave quarters, whipping posts, and slave market platforms. Routes of attack and retreat. Monumental cemeteries of white crosses stretching in rows to the horizon, and also lonesome mountain burials with one name knife-cut into a pine board, weathering blank in ten years and rotted into the ground in twenty. The land itself defaced and haunted with countless places where blood—all red whoever it sprang from—would keep seeping up for generations to come. That place out in the pinewoods would haunt those girls to death and keep haunting. The last one, the youngest—at a hundred years old, tiny and translucent—might tell the story of the marauding army and the killings and the torchlight burials to a little girl in 1950 who would carry it with her into the twenty-first century.

*

—Subtract everything inessential from America and what’s left?

—Geography and political philosophy, V says. The Declaration and Constitution. The Federalist Papers.

—I’d say geography and mythology, James says. Our legends.

He gives examples, talks about Columbus sailing past the edge of the world, John Smith at Jamestown and Puritans at Plymouth Rock, conquering the howling wilderness. Benjamin Franklin going from rags to riches with the help of a little slave trading, Frederick Douglass escaping to freedom, the assassination of Lincoln, annexing the West. All those stories that tell us who we are—stories of exploration, freedom, slavery, and always violence. We keep clutching those things, or at least worn-out images of them, like idols we can’t quit worshipping.


—TAKING THE LIFE OF A NATION is a serious task, V says. Few succeed, even if the cause is just. We didn’t, and ours wasn’t. But sometimes I can’t help missing those days when we all just took care of each other.

—We? James asks.

—Everyone living together at Brierfield and The Hurricane.

—If you mean slaves, you only remember what they allowed you to remember. Even if Davis Bend was really as humane as you believe, they kept their misery to themselves, kept it a mystery to you. I promise that’s true. Think of it as a great gift, a mark of affection. Their protection of your memory.

—Let’s don’t start getting ironic with each other.

—It’s true.

V stands and says, A moment. Please don’t go.

She walks down the steps from the terrace to a path leading into a flower garden. She is gone for fifteen minutes, and in that time an employee of The Retreat comes out from the lobby and asks how he might be of help. A certain tone to the question.

When V returns, she tells about the political fighting in Washington during the whole decade of the fifties, how the struggle over slavery became more and more poisonous, even though a possible model stared the lawmakers on both sides square in the face. Some of the Northern states—Pennsylvania and Connecticut—had just recently finished the gradual abolition of slavery. Others—New Jersey and New Hampshire—were still in the process and remained so until the Emancipation Proclamation. But they all worked on similar plans, ending slavery bloodlessly over time. Of course all the Northern states, including those still holding slaves through the fifties and on into the sixties, claimed high ground. V says, Their moral position in converting from slaveholders to champions of freedom was about like a house cat on a cold night scooting through a closing door just before the latch clacks shut. But sometimes timing is all. A brief moment of history, less than a deep breath, becomes the difference between inside and outside.