Varina(80)

—The newspapers will love that story, she said.


LATE AFTERNOONS she walked down the sand past shiny black devil’s purses, beached jellyfish, sandpipers dashing at the waterline, black-headed gulls standing solemn as deacons, and brown pelicans skimming the water to fill their pouches with little fish. Before sunset, the sky domed soft and blue or flat and gray, and ospreys hovered high, bracing still as hummingbirds against the sea breeze and then plunging, wings tucked, into the water for menhaden and spot. She watched the ospreys so often and so long she realized they usually shifted the fish in their talons to carry them headfirst as they flew away. Always the hiss of low bay waves on sand and the shells of horseshoe crabs like empty helmets.

One particular sunset, a few folks from the town gathered on the beach to fry oysters dredged in cornmeal in a big iron skillet of bacon grease over a beach fire. Men shucked the oysters and threw the shells into a pile, and a woman patted the oysters into a trencher of cornmeal and slipped them into the grease. A few older people sat on three-legged stools and the rest on old patchwork quilts spread over the sand.

They invited V to sit and then continued their conversation. One man told how strong his garden had come in and how sad it was to watch the unpicked excess tomatoes fall from the vine.

A woman said, And yet you never give anybody produce other than squash as big as your arm and soft as a sponge. I’d welcome a basket of fresh tomatoes anytime.

The gardener said, Doesn’t matter what you do, people complain.

One of the younger women eventually said to V, You’re one of the women that has her man locked up in there?

—Yes, V said. A year now.

—Buried under those thick walls?

—He was by himself beneath the casemates for a long time and got sick. But they finally let me take care of him and now we have three rooms of a house.

—Not as bad, then?

—Much better.

An old man with salt-and-pepper hair gone far back at the temples shifted tone and told a story about courting a girl long ago, how he tried to impress her with his horse, which was really not much of a horse to impress a girl with. He said it was a five-gaited gelding—walk, trot, canter, fall down, get back up. But the girl married him anyway. Sadly they never got any children, but happily they lived like newlyweds for forty years, walking on the beach together every evening the weather allowed, except during the worst of the war.

People around the fire said things about how much he must still miss her and how often they remembered her.

After a pause one of the women said to V, You fish much, ma’am?

—Well, I’ve always enjoyed watching it done.

The man with the horse story said, We’ve been trying to be polite, but we know who you are.

—Yes?

—I don’t know how to say it any way but one. We all hope they don’t kill your husband.

—Thank you for that. I hope so too. Down in Savannah the soldiers taught my children to sing a cheerful song about hanging their father.

—They’ll back down, the woman cooking the oysters said. If they wanted him dead they’d never have let him out from under the fort walls. The dirt is so deep over the casemates you can bury a body there. And besides, why make a rival for their own martyred president on purpose?

Everyone sat quietly for a long time. Gray twilight rose from the eastern shore like a morphine daze. And then the horse man said, I bet you have plenty of stories to tell.

—A few, V said.

But all she could remember at the moment related to seafood, a spring when she was twenty or so, the run of shad ascending the Potomac at Washington and men on the shore and out in boats setting seines. Lines of huge cork floats held the top ropes of the seines, and fat lead sinkers dragged the bottom to create a wall of netting. At night, oil lanterns fixed to the cork floats cast yellow light in long bands across the dark river. V told them about riding in an open carriage in the soft spring night, probably feeling all plush from some recent social success and a couple of glasses of wine. She watched the fishermen draw the nets and haul shad in by the thousands. The fish struggled, a roil of packed muscular life, their diamond scales flashing in lantern light.

That recollection did not prove completely satisfying to her audience, so she told the one about her father and the shooting match. She began by saying, Picture a muddle of wealthy ignorant Mississippi gentlemen, drunk and armed with muskets, in a raw patch of new-cleared ground, their horses and slaves shaded at the edge of the woods.

But now the story that seemed tragic when she was younger had become comic, and she successfully played it for laughs.

V sat among the storytellers until the colors of sky and sea balanced themselves alike into a single shade of slate, and she questioned if she were over or under the water, over or under the sky. Only the red coals of the cookfire broke the general blue-gray and fixed a point in space.

The cook spooned more oysters into the hot grease.

V said, Would you have a dozen of those to spare? I know he would like a few.

Moments later, V hurried back through the sally port with a napkin bundle of them, hot and greasy, eight to give to Jeff before they went completely cold and two each for the young guards at the gate who appreciated her treats of candy or pastries and welcomed her comings and goings. She always had something for them, even if only a hard peppermint.

The heavy cannons of the ramparts and the water battery almost disappeared in the dark. The two boys at the gate—young enough to be her sons if she’d had children right after her marriage—ate their oysters in gulps and one of them slightly groaned at the pleasure of it. He raised his fingertips to his face and breathed in the salt sea of the oysters and the earth of bacon grease on his skin.