Varina(68)

V said, After things settle, the land will still be worth something.

Elgin bristled and said, Who’d be buying? Nobody, that’s who. Nobody’s got money. And whatever happens, I ain’t hoeing cotton. Or beans and corn and collards neither. Or milking cows. I don’t plan to live in a world without slaves. Besides, we made more money breeding slaves to sell than growing cotton. So maybe I’ll go to Brazil where the laws keep making sense. These people here want to think I’m responsible for them, but the truth is purely the other way around.

V looked at Belle, and Belle said, I wet-nursed him from the day he was born until he turned three. It’s hard for me to believe he hates me, and hard to hate him.

—Not hard for me, Ryland said, in a whisper loud enough for everyone to hear.

Elgin said, Shut the hell up.


THE CHILDREN DOZED IN FRONT OF THE FIRE, piled together in a nest of quilts. Except Jimmie Limber, who sat next to V, leaning a shoulder into her hip, a hand on her leg as she rubbed his back, cupped the side of his thin neck in her palm. He watched the freed children intently, and they looked back at him the same way, curious and confused.

Belle said what they were all thinking, Whose baby is he?

—Jimmie’s mine, V said. He favors me a little.

—Hmm? Belle said.

Very quickly Ellen said, Nobody knows who his mother was. We found him taking a whipping on the street in Richmond. So Miss V moved him in with her children. Been living there for a couple of years.

—Polishing their shoes and fetching things? Elgin said. Or more like a pet?

—Not either one, Ellen said. They all slept in the nursery. Played and had classes. All the children together.

—Good Lord, Elgin said. You think you’ve heard every manner of shit there is to hear, and then some crazy bitch comes up with something new.

Ryland rose slowly, eased his pistol out of his belt, and held it down by his leg.

He said, Little man, that kind of talk ain’t at all Christian.

V looked at Burton and Burton looked at Ryland and said very low, We can’t afford to go around killing people for every stupid thing they say. We’ve all agreed on that. Stay calm.

Ryland put his pistol back in his belt and said, Now and then, though, it’s the exception that proves the rule. He said it very bright, trying to hold the corners of his mouth level.

Burton announced to the room, We need some sleep, and all of us will sleep right here by the fire. One of us will be awake all the time. I’ll take the first watch.

—You think you’re going to put a watch over us? In my own house? Elgin said.

Delrey said, No judgment as to need. But we’re going to do it the way we’re going to do it.

He raised the angle of his shotgun barrel about an inch and said, I bet we all need to visit the outhouse now that the lightning’s quit. I’ll stand guard outside and make sure everybody’s safe.


AFTER THEY’D ALL GATHERED back around the fire, Elgin said, I’d been wondering how in hell y’all up in Richmond managed to lose the war. Then you show up on my doorstep and it’s clear as day. Worthless people.

—Could have been they outnumbered us, Ryland said. But all the way down here, I’ve been thinking maybe we had it coming.

—Had what coming?

—Losing, Ryland said.

—Say that again, Elgin said.

—You heard me.

—I don’t like to kill people unless I’m sure they need it. So say it one more time and I will lay you down.

Ry said, You’ve not ever worn a uniform or killed anybody, and you’re not going to start now. Have you even had your first drink of liquor?

The boy reached to his waist and pulled out a little hidden Derringer. Silver-plated with pearl grips, three-inch over-under barrels.

Ryland and Bristol both laughed at him when he held it out.

V said, Boys, stop it right now. And you, Elgin, don’t say another word.

—I don’t let women run me, Elgin said.

He kept his little pistol leveled at Ryland.

Ry couldn’t pass up a jab. He said, Except apparently that woman over there is not long since finished nursing you. Diapering too probably. He gestured toward Belle, hovering nearby.

She said, Mr. Elgin, don’t pay attention to their rough talk.

Burton Harrison stood and spread his hands and said, Wait.

V stood too and said, Enough.

And then Elgin twitched a finger, almost a nervous impulse, and an awful instant of time later, Ryland was gone for good.

Bristol stood there, with a look of stunned recognition on his face at just the stupidity of it, just the damn overwhelming thoughtless ignorance and meanness and darkness of humans.

Ryland lay with a hole burned in the weave of his left jacket lapel, all the light gone out of him. Whatever fills the bloody mess inside our heads—the details that make us who we are, those threads of nerve and strange ugly tissues that make us different from each other—Ryland’s had quit working, shut down all at once. He’d transformed in a matter of seconds from being so busy living—fired up and blazing and tiring people down to a nub most days—to being a dead pile of meat and bones and gristle without a spark. Three or four swings of a pendulum and he was all gone.

Elgin shifted his little pistol slightly toward Bristol and sort of smirked.

In the instant it took Ryland to die, Bristol didn’t have time to think or to choose, as if something in him beyond thought didn’t wish to occupy the same world as Elgin.