Varina(79)

They sat and looked, and then Burton said, Do you have memories? Does this make you sad?

—I never want to see a picturesque plantation house again.

On the way back to The Hurricane, she told Burton how Benjamin had invented an effective shallow-water propeller for riverboats and had tried to patent it before the war, but the Federal government denied his claim because as a slave he was not legally a citizen of the United States. So Joseph and Jeff tried to patent it for him in their names, but that didn’t work because, obviously, they hadn’t invented the device, since the patent office already had Ben’s drawings and descriptions and whatever else a patent application required. She’d asked Ben about it after dinner, and he said that immediately following the war when he and all the other freed people had become citizens, he applied again to the federal patent office, and again the answer was nope—without even a reason given.


FOR OLD TIMES’ SAKE, maybe, Ben drove V and Burton to the dock himself. Before they boarded he said to V, My son, Isaiah, and I want to make a place for free black people here on Davis Bend. A community. Come back and see how we’re doing sometime.

—If I ever pass this way again I certainly will. And please ask your girls to write and tell me about their college adventures.

V paused and then said, I’m reminded of a young man I knew not long ago—a phrase he used. New world coming.

—Yes it is, Ben said.


V AND BURTON HEADED UPRIVER planning to make a big, leisurely northeast curve with plenty of stops along the way—Memphis and then Cairo and onto the Ohio River and eventually by railway to New York City. Between the Bend and Memphis, they enjoyed a stretch of perfect, warm winter weather—blue days, yellow sunsets, deep crisp nights of air so dry and clear that the bowl of sky filled with stars. V lacked optimism for a future, so one afternoon she suggested to Burton that since they were together on the wide Mississippi—no guarantees such a moment would ever happen again—they should go on and fulfill their promise to each other early. Wine, water, sunset.

Burton, surprised and a little embarrassed, said, I feel a century older than that boy.

—Let’s call it a celebration. We’ve survived to see what happens next, even if it’s grim.

So after an early dinner in the salon—sun setting over the water in colors of gold and silver, brass and iron—V and Burton found chairs on the hurricane deck above the bow. A lone kite glided over—scissoring its forked tail, banking and pitching as it swooped close by the pilothouse. A dense flight of swallows formed shapes against the sky like a child molding a dough ball, never quite creating a convincing box turtle or dog’s head or teapot, but still moving from idea to idea with beautiful fluidity.

V and Burton sat long through the evening with two bottles of fairly good Bordeaux dated before the war, scavenged by the captain from a private stock he’d stored cool below the waterline. They touched glasses in unspoken toasts to avoiding disaster that day and then they dinged spoken toasts to lifelong friendship.

Down toward the bottom of the second bottle—both of them laughing, shawled in blankets—V raised a glass proposing words she wanted Burton to say at her funeral. She said, I’ve been working on it, and I’ll keep refining it over time, but write this down for now—Had I been consulted about the cosmos, I should have criticized its parts with great vigor and complained about the result, in fact I—as at present informed—should have resisted imposing Adam’s society upon Eve as an infliction of boredom not justified by a paternal government.

—Really? Burton said. That’s what you want at your funeral?

—Think of it as a closing argument. At least it will get a laugh from Mary Chesnut.

A couple of weeks later when they parted in New York, V hugged Burton close and then held him out at arm’s length and said, Till death do us part, yes?


EVENTUALLY PRESIDENT JOHNSON’S ATTENTION became distracted by his own impeachment trial, and his urgency to hang Jefferson subsided. V was given permission to visit her husband, who had been moved from his cell to a small aboveground room because the doctors thought he might die from the damp casemates. Then after a great deal of lobbying, she received permission to live at the fort, and she and Jeff were given quarters in a house with a narrow bridge from the top floor over to the ramparts, and they could walk the mile circuit of the fort with wide views of the bay and Hampton Roads. Jefferson’s lawyers began to feel a little hope that the Federals lacked the nerve to try him, fearing they would lose their case and be forced to free a vindicated Jefferson Davis on the world.


EASED FROM DREADING THE WORST by having it mostly happen, V tried out the idea that she was still theoretically youngish in body and mind. She started going out to the beach at Old Point Comfort at dawn and swimming with the young wife of an officer. When they made it a distance offshore and turned to start back, the huge black cannon barrels of the water battery loomed like a cresting wave. Sometimes when she wanted to swim or to walk beyond the walls and the shopkeeper General Miles tried to stop her, she’d remind him that she was not his prisoner. He agreed he couldn’t legally make her stay inside the walls but suggested that if she needed total freedom she might find rooms with the whores in Norfolk, since she already knew a couple of them intimately. Otherwise, she should remember he had the power to have her stripped to the skin and searched again for any reason—including his own amusement—every time she came and went.