Varina(85)

—No, you didn’t say that to Lizzie Custer, V said.

—I damn well did. She wasn’t paying my wages. The only reason I hadn’t packed my valise and walked out the door was that the house needed caring for and because I hadn’t quite figured where else to go, since the trains to Baltimore weren’t running yet. So to get back to the point in my tale where I was interrupted, come about midnight, young Mister Custer gallops up straight from the battlefield, throws open the front door without knocking, long saber rattling in a scabbard at his side, red faced and greasy blond hair hanging down from his hatband past his collar. Had been riding for hours, and he more than sort of smelled. Didn’t say a word to me other than, Where is she? I lifted my thumb straight up, and he climbed the steps two at a time with his scabbard clashing against every baluster. He stopped at the top and shouted down to send up a few bottles of the best wine or whiskey you’ve got, immediately. The headboard banged the wall half the night. Next morning at breakfast, he looked half drunk still and his face the color of flour paste. But she came down bright-eyed and rosy, barefooted and still wearing a silk shift so thin that when she walked by a window you knew everything there was to know about her.

—Sounds like they found fun in that sad old place.

—I couldn’t take much of it. As soon as the trains started running north, I packed and left.


ONE MORNING MARY MENTIONED that Ellen was to be married in a week, out between Harpers Ferry and Shepherdstown. Mary said, It’s not so far. We might go together? Out on the train early and back late after the wedding. A long day, but the schedule works. I wrote her you were here.

—I haven’t been invited, V said.

—I’m doing that. She’s afraid to ask directly, worries you’re angry with her because of what she said after the war to a New York paper.

—What?

—The reporter asked her how you were, Mary said. You know, as a master or owner or whatever you people called it back then. He was looking for dirt, I guess. Ellen said you were fine. Nice enough. But that she much preferred not having an owner.

—Why would that make me mad? It’s generous of her. And who wouldn’t rather be free? Write her back and tell her I’ll happily come. I’ll even sew her a pretty summer dress for a wedding present.

And yet, V kept thinking, Just all right? Nice enough? We were friends.

V took a guess at Ellen’s current size based on the fact that everybody seemed to have swollen some with the passage of time. Except probably Mary Chesnut. And of course Jeff, whose flesh drew year by year closer to his bones. So for Ellen’s dress, V left plenty of fabric behind the seams in the parts where it might need to be let out.

*

—Wait, James says.

—What?

—Even years after the war, you thought of Ellen simply as your friend?

—It felt that way.

James opens his notebook, turns pages looking for something he wrote on the train three or four weeks ago.

—Here, he says. Pemberton. You talked about the complexity of his relationship with Mr. Davis. You found it dark and ominous, a relationship twisted and falsified by ownership. Always a vast imbalance of power with the threat of violence. How did your husband and his brother put it? That the solution to the fundamental problem of capitalism was slavery, making labor and capital one and the same? He didn’t address the methods necessary to keep human beings under control to make his system work.

—Their ideology, not mine. He and Joseph were of one mind on that. Ellen and I were women raising children and keeping a complicated household going during a difficult time. Not men with power. It didn’t feel nearly as ominous as Jeff and Pemberton.

—Ominous to Ellen, though, I would think. Look at what she said very politely to the newspaper reporter about freedom. Think about it. Remember that back in the Gray House, every hold she had on her own life, any sense of security, ran straight through you.

*

Ellen’s wedding was a quiet, middle-aged sort of ceremony. V and Mary were the only white people. All the others were farm families making a living off of twenty acres, or else people with jobs in the nearby towns, men who worked for the railroad, women who managed households for wealthier people. Ellen’s husband was named Gabriel, a slim, balding widower with hazel eyes. They had a green farm with a big vegetable garden and cornfields and potato fields. An orchard of apple trees, a few hogs and a milk cow and a plow mule, and a yard full of chickens and ducks and turkeys and guineas. A small white house with a green roof and a big porch with red rocking chairs and a brown hound dog and Gabriel’s two young girls named Rhina and Tay that Ellen kept hugging and kissing before and after the ceremony until they squirmed and laughed and ran away and then ran right back for more.

Gabriel came to V and said, Missus Davis, welcome and thank you for coming. It means a lot to Ellen to have you here. I hope you’re comfortable.

V said, It means a lot to me to be here. Ellen and I went through difficult times together, and I’m happy to see her new life.

—Things are different now.

—Yes they are. And I’m very glad these are better times.

The weather that day was fine, so the ceremony happened at the bottom of the porch steps. Guests spread across the front yard, some standing and some sitting on quilts. For afterward, people brought ham biscuits and fried chicken and bowls of vegetables and pies. After lunch, V hugged Ellen tight, and said the first stupid thing that came to mind, Be happy.