Varina(61)
It is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet’s nest which extends from mountain to ocean, and legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary; it puts us in the wrong; it is fatal.
Ultimately Jeff, who had read nearly as much history as V, refused to see that days of building and maintaining fortunes based on enslavement were passing quickly. Country after country had been finding various ways to end the ownership of people. Haiti, Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, Venezuela, and Peru saw the writing on the wall. Jeff and his wealthy and powerful friends couldn’t.
Scaffold
February 1862
OUT THE WINDOW A LOW SKY AND DRIZZLE, EVERYTHING gray. February cold radiated through the glass. Even in cobbled streets, mud swelled between stones and smeared into horse shit and the general everyday effluent to make a gray organic paste, slick and greasy and shoe-heel deep, shiny even in the absence of sunlight. V raised the window sash a few inches and reached her hand into the morning and found the day as raw to her palm as it appeared, the air fragrant as an outhouse.
She turned straight from the window to her medicine. Her new doctor had suggested—as if it were a brilliant discovery—that when she felt low, cored out, she should take a glass of wine and a pinch of morphine. Same prescription as when she’d miscarried and also when Samuel died. The current new baby, Billy, lived and existed as a real being in the world, sleeping and eating and crying and filling diapers to his armpits. But every moment her insides pulled at her, much like with the lost children, a feeling of absence, a suction. She unfolded the wax-paper packet and tapped some of its powder into a generously sized wineglass and then poured Bordeaux near the brim. Just enough room to stir with her finger until the lumps dissolved and then put her finger in her mouth so as not to lose a grain.
Fifteen minutes after, still feeling desperately empty, she poured another glass and the remainder of the packet. She put on a robe and walked downstairs to the kitchen, moving like fog from room to room, down two flights of stairs and along hallways. So drifting in her thoughts that she kept touching walls with fingertips to confirm reality.
In the kitchen Mary O’Melia and Ellen worked with their housemaids and under-cooks preparing for the party that evening. Mary ran the place as head housekeeper, and Ellen was the main cook. V was still fairly new to the house and to both of them.
—Coffee? V said, standing in the doorway, a hand on the casing.
Mary O’Melia was a broad-faced Irish widow of a ship captain—maybe a year or two younger than V, pretty and tough and weary. She’d been trapped in the South after borders shut down following Sumter. All her American family lived in Baltimore, and she let everyone know she couldn’t wait for the war to end one way or the other so she could go home and be with her children. Mary said, Ma’am, I know you’re new here. We all are. But the way it works is you pull the cord and ring the bell, and I send someone right up to see what you want done, and then we do it. So go back upstairs and let’s practice.
V looked at Ellen, and Ellen smiled and shrugged her shoulders.
—Problem is, I’m here now, V said.
—Cup or mug? Ellen said.
—Mug, please.
Ellen poured and then walked V back to the third floor. Ellen was a slim, serious young woman who looked about an equal mixture of white and black and wore her hair pulled tight to her head, parted down the middle. She set V’s mug down and said, I’d tell you Mrs. O’Melia’s bark is worse than her bite, except pretty often she bites too.
HALF AN HOUR BEFORE SHOWTIME, V and Jeff emerged from the front door of the Gray House. With Jeff’s upturned hand cupping her elbow, they drifted with the rain across the sidewalk and into the carriage, a wave of perfect black and white fabric and a dark violet sheen in V’s skirts. Jeff gripped his inaugural speech tight under his right arm inside a leather folder—written in V’s blue hand, which Jeff read more easily than his own because she silently acknowledged his diminished eyesight and wrote extra large. Settled in the carriage, Jeff tapped her wrist, the intimate coin-size exposure of flesh where the glove hooked and blue veins pulsed, a touch of fingertip subtle and intimate as a Masonic handshake. He looked straight ahead. She turned her palm up and gripped his hand, feeling the bones beneath the skin, all knuckle and joint, a tiny bundle of kindling.
She said, You can make a bad speech sound good.
An escort of footmen, six black men meant to walk alongside the carriage, began forming up—two ahead of the front wheels, two behind the back wheels, two by the doors. They dressed as pallbearers. Mourning clothes. Black suits, black vests, black top hats banded with black satin. One man even wore a hank of limp black veil trailing like a horsetail from his hatband down past the collar of his coat. They might as well have fixed black-dyed ostrich plumes from the brow bands of the horse bridles.
V sat observing the scene through her side window. A few colors—highly saturated—dazzled in the gray morning. Teeth in the pallbearers’ mouths, white and yellow, seemed exaggerated as colors of cake icing. Missing teeth deep black. One pallbearer’s cravat a bluebird splash at his neck. Everything else rendered in shades of black and gray like a photograph. Mud wetted the backs of their pant cuffs. The black of the mourning bands around their hats blacker than a moonless night sky. Blacker than a hundred-year-old mojo hand, blacker than the bottom of a Welsh coal pit, blacker than the iris of the devil’s right eye. A black with its own draw, a puckered suction pulling down.