Varina(65)

A black girl, maybe eight or nine, led an old white man, half blind and mostly deaf and holding a rusty ear trumpet. She carried what had been a smoked hog leg by its foot. They’d shaved the meat away to a few maroon petals clinging to the bone.


HEART OF THE WASTELAND. The day pressed deeply humid, air laden so heavy with moisture and pollen that the color of the sky was a matter open to argument. The edges of things—tree leaves, tree bark, the features of a loved one’s face—from fifty feet away looked soft and blurred, barely identifiable.

They stopped in the remains of an empty one-street town. Houses and a few stores scattered on either side of the main road. Two of the buildings were painted white and the rest varied in color depending on how long the bare wood siding and shingles had faced the weather.

They walked into a half-burned hotel. A dark-headed girl played a dreamy nocturne at the lobby piano, notes spaced at careful intervals.

—Are rooms available for the night?

The girl looked around confused, her face the color of cake flour and her eyes dark. She said, Nobody’s here. The piano still plays, so I thought I’d play it.

—Is there someone we could ask about rooms?

—Everybody’s gone and nobody cares. Look on the second floor. Go left at the top of the stairs. Some of those rooms might still be dry.

V said, Please keep playing.

The girl stood up and closed the key-lid. She said, I don’t care for an audience.


THOSE STRANGE DAYS, a lot of people used up parts of themselves they could never regenerate. Everyone in the territory they passed through had lost so much and were being offered many thousands in Federal gold—money to last a lifetime—if they provided information leading to the capture of the fugitives. Who would blame hungry people for claiming such a treasure?


THEY PASSED THROUGH rolling country for a few days, and the towns seemed little more than collections of sheds, but they took names from Greek and Roman cities. V remembers an unexpected steep hill pitching down to just a little creek, the way the horses squatted on their hocks against the grade. It was sunset, but people stood by the side of the road and stared, and when V said Good day, they looked away without a word.

Then a day where they didn’t even break camp, hard rain from dawn to sunset, lightning and thunder making the children shriek. After the rains, they traveled three days through drowned pineland where mosquitoes flew so thick the fugitives couldn’t sleep even when they dragged bedding directly into the smoke of the fire. More time went lost when everyone except Bristol and Ryland fell sick, a terrible purging. For three days, unrelenting fever and chills and raging bowels. The children were pitiful, and the adults alternated sleeping and rushing to the woods. Delrey tried to take care of the horses and mules, but stopped over and over to hump with his hands on his knees and heave. Same for V and Ellen when they tried to comfort the children.

The navy boys—so young they still grew pale down on their cheeks and shaved only out of vanity—worked dawn to dark doing the best they knew to nurse them all. Fetch water and clean children busy vomiting and having the flux. Whenever an adult could sit up to take liquids, they would steep herb tea or brew a bit of precious coffee.

The children suffered better than the rest. They fretted and cried, and their faces became gray with dark circles under their eyes, but they also slept a lot. Frantic and desperate one minute and then the next, without transition, dead to the world, unconscious yet still sucking a thumb, at least the youngest ones.

When they all recovered enough to travel, they only went two hours and then stopped for a day by a pretty river to wash and dry a pile of filthy linens.

Then for two clear days and nights they passed through country with few people and smooth roads. They went nearly twenty miles in one day—the first and only time.


LATE AFTERNOON, they took a side road to avoid passing through a town. For a moment V could see houses and stores distant across a cotton field growing up in weeds. No one in sight. Rain fell slow, and smoke from chimneys sank low to the ground. Then up ahead a group of people came around a bend in the road. They were wet and carried hoes and shovels and rakes over their shoulders the way men carry long rifles when they’re walking a distance. These were farmers willing to plant fields without mules or slaves in a time of so much disaster and uncertainty that it took great faith and hope to gamble on a harvest months into a future that looked a shambles.

It was too late to do anything but keep moving toward them. The fugitives had agreed that in such circumstances, Delrey should do the talking. So V ducked under the canvas with the children and tried to keep them quiet, but they were in a talking mood. So the best she could do was make a game out of whispering and sign language. As they passed the farmers, V could hear their questions and Delrey’s answers.

—Who is the lady?

—Mrs. Jones.

—Where you coming from?

—Up the road a ways.

—Where you heading?

—Down the road a piece.

—Pretty nice bunch of horses and mules.

—Because we’ve not allowed anybody to steal them from us.

—Who’s these other people?

—Family members.

—Any news of the war?

—It’s done’s all I hear, Delrey said.

—Heard some fool shot Lincoln and killed him. That true?

—You know more than I do, Delrey said.