Varina(71)

WHEN HE FINISHES HIS STORY, James says, I know your feeling about taking notes as we talk. But I need to write something down. It’s about me, not you.

—Please, V says. Scribble.

James opens his notebook and writes,

The island was a separate place, situated partway between America and the moon. Some clear nights out with the telescope—moon full or gibbous—I felt about equidistant between the sharp-edged craters and the sparkling lights of America across the harbor. I knew that off the island very particular rules and laws and customs about skin color and blood degree applied, that the entire stretch of country from ocean to ocean was a strange place with a very strict borderline, and that I didn’t exactly fit on either side of it.

Then across the bottom of the page—in a larger, more swooping hand—he writes:

The island felt like home to a degree I’ve never experienced before or since.

After he caps his pen, V says, You’re not even going to read it to me?

—Revision first. It makes us all better than we are. For now, tell me about our capture.





Place of Dreams


May 1865


THEY PASSED OUT OF SHERMAN’S PATH OF PUNISHMENT and went dragging down ordinary red Georgia roads, sloping south on their beaten way. Small towns and small farms lay wide-spaced among pinewoods. The horses and mules were as tired as the people, and they made fewer than their average ten miles a day. Florida still lay vague in the distance, and the only map forward might have been drawn in a crazy man’s hand, speculating on a place V would never reach no matter how long she traveled.

Most days Bristol trailed off the back, riding by himself. Delrey kept reminding him he would need to hang a right at some point if he was heading for Alabama, but Bristol said maybe he’d go all the way until they hit the Gulf and then he’d peel off west and follow the coastline around the curve to Mobile. Take his time.

V sat with him one day at their lunch stop and said, I know you’re hurting two directions. For Ryland and for having killed Elgin. I’ll point out that better boys than that one—hundreds of thousands of them on both sides—have gone down in this mess.

—So you consider Elgin a war fatality? Bristol said.

—I don’t consider him anything. He pulled the trigger first, over nothing but words and ideas. But you pulled the trigger over something real—a mean bloody act that took your friend’s life. There’s a difference. Don’t let him weigh heavier on your mind than he merits.

—Yes, ma’am.

—Don’t you Yes, ma’am me. This is too important to fall back on manners. A lot of boys would be strutting around, bragging like they’d killed their first buck. But that’s not you, and that’s why we’re talking. I don’t want what happened to ruin you for the rest of your life. I’m assuming your family had some money or else you’d have been in the infantry instead of the academy.

—Some. My father has a business, not a plantation.

—Then go home, and when colleges open back up, finish an education. Do something that helps people get through the chaos. For a long time, it’s going to be like Noah after the flood—everybody, black and white, trying to understand what’s left when the water drains away. Bad enough without having your mind overly darkened by that one instant.

—So we’ve all got a load of guilt to haul? That’s my big lesson?

—Don’t get sarcastic with me. I’m saying most of the load is not yours to bear. It’s ours, the people who brought it on. When you get home, rest and start clearing your head from all this, and then go and do, Bristol.


AS THEY TRUDGED SOUTH, V kept Bristol close and watched his moods. She wanted him sitting at her campfire every night, not going off to spread his bedroll alone in the pines. She and the children and Ellen, Burton, and Delrey still usually sat an hour on low camp stools arranged around the fire no matter how tired they were. Some evenings they barely spoke and looked at the flames like they’d been dazed by a great blast of black powder. Cool nights, Jeffy and Jimmie and Billy sat sprawling against each other half asleep. Sometimes V would rouse up from such a moment of gloom and recite a poem. She would tell them all to attend, and then look off into the dregs of sunset and tell them the name of the poem and of the person who wrote it and then launch into something beautiful. V guessed Bristol and all the others were often too exhausted to listen close to the words, only the music of the poem, the tune of it. They could get all the meaning they needed right there in the rhythm without keeping up with grammar at all. That and the flow of light from the fire moving on their circle of faces as she recited.

At some point most nights she would decide her children looked or smelled dirty, which they all usually did. She’d take a pail of creekwater warmed over the fire, a washcloth, and a worn flat of fragrant pink soap and start scrubbing. And if Bristol was sitting there she’d scrub him too, forehead to collarbones. Push his hair back and scour his blemished teen forehead, run her finger covered with the soapy washcloth deep in his ears. When she was done he glowed red as firecoals, his neck and face chafed near to bleeding. He’d smell like roses and whatever fragrance that night’s creek carried—pine needles or rotted leaves or minerals in the rocks.


SOME NIGHTS V ASKED BRISTOL to tell a story—a tale from his time in the Naval Academy with Ryland or one of their adventures journeying south from Richmond with Jeff. One night he told about the remnants of the government in Greensboro, how some of the cabinet members and high officers had to sleep on pallets in boxcars.