Varina(81)

He reminded V of those thousands of young dying men in the hospitals of Richmond. Northern boys and Southerners, blown apart by war, lying swaddled in bloody bandages, their limbs and the features of their faces blasted away. How difficult on her daily visits not to tell them to go right ahead and die at that very moment of young life while still ruled by a rising tide of emotions, those same emotions old cynical politicians and businessmen and army officers used against them to convince them to fight and die. Hard not to hold their chilly hands with ragged dirty nails and push the long hair back and kiss their sweaty brows and say, Don’t wait, do it now, not decades later when every throb of feeling ebbs, every action and choice becomes tinged with regret and harsh judgment, a sense of waste and loss and emptiness, life narrowing down to little more than an endless railway tunnel. Let go, son. It will be all right. Take one deep breath and then just rise from this bad place and from your broken body and keep going. I’ll sit here with you and hold your hand until you’ve made it past the bend in the road and into the green woods.

And truthfully, one time she couldn’t help but actually say it. She whispered into a boy’s ear like a sweetheart, Walk into the big green woods. I’ll wait here and watch until you’re gone. She said it hardly louder than a sigh, and—like a magic spell—the boy died right then. Holding his hand, she could feel life go, the lifting of the spirit, a sudden lightness. And then that young man blown apart by the sorry war became young and whole forever.


TWO YEARS AFTER HIS IMPRISONMENT, Jefferson and V left the Fortress and went up the James to federal court in Richmond. They stayed at the Spotswood Hotel only because few downtown hotels had been rebuilt after the fall and the fire. They agreed not to talk about staying there when they first arrived in Richmond.

Next day the court granted bail, and wealthy Yankees like Horace Greeley and Cornelius Vanderbilt put up the money, largely as a way to clear the last rubble from the war and help the country reunite and move forward. Jeff was free to go, though the treason charges hadn’t yet been dropped.

They went straight back to their room in the Spotswood. Jeff sat in a straight chair and looked out the window. V flopped onto the bed and lay staring at the ceiling blank as a corpse. Half an hour later, Jeff said, They lost their nerve. I didn’t lose mine.

V, still staring at the ceiling, said, Yes. I never doubted you’d be willing to let pride dig your grave in that damp casemate. You already had dirt twenty feet deep over you.

*

On the way back to Albany that evening, James Blake writes:

Especially since I found the blue book, I’ve come to see Mr. Davis and his beliefs this way. He did as most politicians do—except more so—corrupt our language and symbols of freedom, pervert our heroes. Because, like so many of them, he held no beloved idea or philosophy as tightly as his money purse. Take a king or a president or anybody. Put a heavy sack of gold in one hand and a feather-light declaration about freedom in the other. And then an outlaw sticks a pistol in his face and says give me one or the other. Every time—ten out of ten—he’ll hug the sack and throw away the ideals. Because the sack’s what’s behind the ideals, like the foundation under a building. And that’s how freedom and chains and a whipping post can live alongside each other comfortably.





Sixth Sunday





Saratoga Springs


RACE DAYS, SURREYS FROM THE HOTEL TRAVEL TO THE track every half hour. James and Laura and V ride three across—V in the middle, talking brightly about the horses and her strategies for betting, the latest gossip concerning owners and trainers and jockeys. She knows all the Kentucky thoroughbreds here now, shining like waxed walnut or coal or bronze in the sun, their strange names and individual personalities.

Laura says, I like to watch them eat their grain from their buckets. They’re so serious about it. And I want to kiss their velvet noses, except racehorses are nervous and some of them bite.

—Do you bet? James asks Laura.

—I always bet everything I have with me on the first race—the horse I think has the funniest name. I quit when I run out of money.

—Except she never does because she wins most of the time, V says. She refuses to tell me her real system. Mostly the horses she bets don’t even have funny names.

—Funny to me, Laura says.

James says, I’m just going to observe for today.

Laura leans her head on V’s shoulder and closes her eyes.


JAMES ASKS, How did Hamlet go?

—Because it’s a movie—no talking, all pictures, and film is expensive—the filmmaker went through the play with a red pencil and cut it to twelve minutes. Kept the ghost and the skull and all the killing and dying. Swordplay. And since our Ophelia is beautiful, they boiled her parts down to mostly embracing and kissing the prince. I played the aggrieved ghost. Flowing robes, white face, black around the eyes like a raccoon.

Laura barely opens her eyes and says, I couldn’t even look at her.


THEY WALK THE ROWS of low stables and watch horses being groomed and tacked. The ones running later in the afternoon stand in their stalls and reach over the half-doors to pull hay from their nets. Laura holds V’s hand much of the time, particularly when they approach knots of people.

Some of the grooms have known V for years and whisper tips as they pass by. They say, Missus V, Cairngorm’s a little off today. Blue Girl’s full of herself, about to jump out of her skin. Sir Visto looks good. Spindrift’s ready to run. Ten Brooks and Asteroid about like always, like they know their jobs.