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  Other pieces of writing, though, she would have done gratis. One such piece of free advice went to a friend whose daughter was about to jump into marriage with a wealthy older widower. The girl’s name was Belle, and V had known her since childhood. In a letter to the mother, V spilled her heart—writing:

  I am not pleased with the widower prospect. It is offering a burnt out vessel to a fresh young girl like Belle. This suitor steps up long after a successful love he had identified as his eternal soul life, and then she was removed by death. I gave the best & all of my life to a girdled tree, it was live oak and good for any purpose except for blossom & fruit, and I am not willing for Belle to be content with anything less than the whole of a man’s heart.

  V would have offered her thoughts on the dedication of Grant’s Tomb for free as well, but the World insisted on paying her, and she was in no position to turn down a check. She attended the ceremony at the invitation of her friend Julia, Grant’s widow. The papers—north and south—found the friendship between V and Julia odd and exciting, and wrote about it as if the two women ought to have nothing in common when, in fact, they had a great deal. V and Julia took regular carriage rides in Central Park, and lunched at prominent restaurants. They wanted to be seen together, wanted their friendship to be noted and commented on in the papers, even if they both faced criticism by hard-shelled Confederates and Federals for it. They wanted to show that reconciliation was possible. For several summers before Julia’s death, she and V spent vacations together—adjacent cottages at modest Adirondack lodges. So many evenings sitting in uncomfortable wooden chairs watching the sun set behind lakes and mountains, talking about everything except that horrible war.

  —Write about that, V says to James. I’m rather proud of Julia and myself for our friendship.

  —So if I decide to write a book, I have your blessing? James says. Your help?

  —No. Let’s keep calling it visiting and talking. Come again next Sunday. Then write what you want. Or not. Doesn’t matter to me. For so long I thought everything I cared about was lost, never to be returned. Seeing one of my boys still in the world is plenty for me. Seeing you going and doing.

  —The visits mean a lot to me too, and I want them to continue. But if I jotted notes now and then . . . ?

  —No. Let’s not get professional. Unreliable memory is all we have. You ask, and I’ll try to answer the best I can remember, and then you patch my forty-year-old memories onto your photographic flashes and the blue book.

  —All right, then. Your wedding and after?

  * * *

  Knoxie’s death had been a deep and slowly killing wound and had weakened their marriage from the start. Her ghost haunted even their wedding. They’d had a big ceremony planned at Davis Bend, but that got canceled last-minute for reasons V has never discussed. They didn’t much communicate for a while, and then all of a sudden the wedding was back on, at The Briers this time, with no Davis other than Jeff attending. Oddly, on the boat down to Natchez before the improvised wedding, Jeff ran into Knoxie’s father, General Zachary Taylor—eventually to become President Taylor—for the first time since the elopement long ago. What a sweet moment for their reconciliation. About that same time Eliza thought it useful to write V a letter describing how Jeff had been going through an old trunk and found a pair of Knoxie’s slippers and fainted from excess emotion. Then, after the wedding, on the way downriver to New Orleans for their honeymoon, Jeff insisted on stopping to visit Knoxie’s grave.

  That’s when V should have realized that she could not miraculously heal a girdled tree—bark cut and peeled away past the living flesh in a wide belt around the trunk. The sap stops flowing, and you starve the tree to death. But it takes a long time. On a tree you cut the belt down into the white. On a person you’d cut into to the red.

  AS TO THE SIMPLE, rushed wedding at The Briers, V judged it elaborate enough for a farmer’s wife. Since it happened spur-of-the-moment, she didn’t wear a gown. She pulled an almost-white dress—Indian muslin—out of her wardrobe and on her way out into the yard for the vows, she picked a pink rose from the garden to wear in her hair because she had been doing that since she was a child. The rush to marry, of course, caused speculation at the time and down through the years. But that sort of curiosity V has never cared to satisfy.

  SHE THOUGHT SHE HAD MARRIED an idiosyncratic widower with a raw plantation on the Mississippi between Natchez and Vicksburg. She expected they would spend their lives growing cotton and food crops and children. Maybe if he stayed interested in politics he would get elected to the state legislature and would spend a few weeks every year in Jackson, the capital city. Several times a year she would spend a few weeks in Natchez visiting her family, and maybe she and Jeff would make a tradition of spending two weeks in New Orleans together before Christmas. Whether she had married the dullard heir or the woodcutter remained unclear, but a quiet, ordered life seemed likely.

  Except, while she was still eighteen—honeymoon barely over—Jeff spent a few weeks riding around the district enduring fish fries, hog barbecues, cockfights, and assaults of patriotic music blurted out of bugles and flügelhorns and French horns, and giving political speeches considered good but chilly, though everyone agreed he looked slim and elegant behind a podium. At one of the few rallies V attended, a woman whispered to her that she would be his greatest asset, said that previously he’d had everything he needed for high office except a hostess, but now he has you. And the woman was right—after the vote was counted Jeff became a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. V had lived in his strangely designed house only two seasons before they packed up and headed to Washington.

  BEFORE RAILROADS, there were two choices for getting to the nation’s capital. The southern route went down the river to New Orleans, and then by many rivers and stagecoaches to Charleston, and from there a ship up the coast to Norfolk, and finally a boat up the Potomac. So many connections to go wrong.

  They chose the northern route, upriver past Memphis and onto the Ohio River, which V knew little about. The water was low after Cairo, and the Ohio was a crazy river, nothing but big meanders. But at least they didn’t have to change conveyances every day. The farther up they went, the colder it got. At first the ice sparkling along the riverbanks seemed pretty, but then chunks of ice started floating in the river, and the chunks grew larger and larger until they bumped and scraped the hull, which was alarming at night. V hadn’t experienced snow and ice since her partial school year at Madame X’s in Philadelphia, and she hadn’t missed those two expressions of weather one little bit. But she and Jeff snuggled tight in their cabin under piles of blankets reading books by candlelight. Then, at a narrows, the boat became iced-in by chunks big as johnboats. The paddle wheels wouldn’t turn. After the second day, the situation quit being romantic.

  They remained stuck for most of a week until a small boat, jangling its bells, took them to the riverbank where they sat on their trunks until a large farm sled with oak runners could be found. Partway to Wheeling the sled skidded down a twenty-foot bank and bashed into a tree and broke a runner. One of the mules was badly injured and had to be put down. Their one traveling companion—another Mississippi congressman, an old colonel—broke a rib, and V was bruised around the head and shoulders. Jeff—who’d spent many winters up in Wisconsin and Minnesota—knew how to manage ice and snow. He became heroic. He patched the runner together and mostly walked to spare the lone mule. He guided them, assured them, saved them. He was like Florida’s Big Bear Theory made concrete.

  They spent nights in farmhouses and inns. It was Dutch country, and every meal featured bratwurst drenched in maple syrup with maybe some mustard and a pickle. Maybe a boiled potato. V craved a bowl of shrimp gumbo with lots of okra, peppers and onions, hot sauce. And a big side of greens.

  Eventually they fetched up at the edge of the Alleghenies in Wheeling. V had never seen mountains, so the snow-covered ridges seemed impossibly tall to a girl who’d hardly been out of
Mississippi and Louisiana. At the hotel she looked in the mirror and her bruised face looked back in shades of blue and black and green. She felt like an adventurer.

  From there it was east over the ridges in stagecoaches, and then little boats on little rivers to Philadelphia. Then a mix of stages and railways to Washington. When they arrived at Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel—days late for the opening of Congress—V met Mary Chesnut on her first pass through the busy lobby and couldn’t have cared less how she looked that moment, which was disheveled, bruised, dirty, and excited at the sudden amplitude of her life.

  * * *

  James leaves The Retreat late, just before dinnertime. He reaches his hand to V in farewell, and she hugs him instead.

  At the station, the 6:35 has already left. When the porter sees James on the platform, he comes over and says, I got worried when you missed your train.

  —No need, James says. I’ll be on the seven-twenty-nine.

  The porter says, Must make it easier roaming the white world in those clothes.

  James looks down at himself. He smiles, shakes his head, shrugs his shoulders.

  ON THE WAY BACK TO ALBANY, James hunches over his notebook. Trying to remember exact phrases, particular observations. Compounding her unreliable memory with his own.

  Very fast, he scribbles a conversation—rehearsing for next week:

  —Was I born enslaved?

  —I can’t answer because I don’t know. And why should it matter? That world’s dead and gone.

  —No, it’s not. The answer won’t change how I feel about myself, but it matters. It’s a fact about my life I need to know.

  —That’s not your real question. Just voice it.

  —All right, then. Did you ever own me?

  Third Sunday

  Saratoga Springs

  —A DECADE, THAT’S THE NUMBER, V SAYS.

  —Pardon?

  —The past week I’ve estimated how much of my life since the age of twenty-five I spent wearing mourning. By the second half of the war so many had died that black silk disappeared. After little Joe fell, I had to wear cotton darkened with a muddy brew of walnut hulls and indigo. Those big black dresses wore you rather than the other way around. When we left Richmond, I had just shed the black from Joe.

  —I thought about a lot of things last week too, James says. I keep trying to remember that journey, but all I come up with are those brief flashes. I’m not sure whether they’re real or if I’m inventing them.

  —For me, those fugitive months keep rolling back in great detail no matter how hard I try to push them behind me. I’ve accepted that they’re the axle of my life. Everything turns around them.

  —A place where a road splits in two is one thing I keep seeing. A Y with a big white house in the fork.

  Abbeville

  1865

  WET MOST DAYS FROM CHARLOTTE INTO SOUTH CAROLINA.

  This particular day had been every kind of weather from fog to fine showers to moments of sunshine to a brief thunderstorm in the early afternoon. So at camp that evening, firewood was damp and took time to light and then burned smoky and slow. Six miles at best from breaking one camp to setting up the next—bad time for sure. Except Delrey, a stoic philosopher of physical endurance, discouraged that kind of thinking. He had various sayings, doled out a sentence at a time as V needed them, each one a nugget of wisdom. She recorded examples in her notebook.

  We’re not by any means getting to Florida in one sprint, so don’t start counting days or miles.

  The end of every day has to leave all of us able to get up in the morning and do it all over again and then do it again day after tomorrow.

  You have to get your mind right, and always look way down the road, not at your feet.

  The slowest man sets the pace because we’re not the kind of people to leave anybody behind.

  In a collapse of such magnitude—a provisional country scoured to bare nubs—rules of behavior wash away. V knew the men accompanying her still suffered under the old rules, but the day they realized that everything had changed would be when they either slipped away in the dark feeling ashamed or told her to her face she deserved her fate and put spur to flank and rode toward home in broad daylight. And over the course of that April week—day and night—most of them did leave, taking horses and mules and what supplies they could carry and abandoning unnecessary wagons by the side of the road with the tongues angling to the dirt. V, though, believed Delrey would stay with her to the end of the road, and she knew Burton would.

  MIDAFTERNOON, a rider came up from behind, pushing his horse at a trot hard enough to cover ground for hours but not enough to break the horse down. He wore farmer clothes—butterscotch canvas pants with dirty bagged-out knees, scuffed brogans, a worn-out straw hat. But V knew right off he was a cavalryman. He didn’t announce it, but he posted smoothly and elegantly, and he wore interesting facial hair, as many in the cavalry tended to do. He had managed to leave the war with a fine sorrel gelding, its coat the color of copper in the sun. Battle wounds marked its hide, and it was weary and skinny from hard traveling—in need of grain and a month to rest and graze and become magnificent again. The saddle had once been as fine as the horse, but wear and weather left the flaps curling and leather peeling down to the tree at the pommel.

  The man said his name was Biddle and that he was on the way home to a little town south of the Florida line where his family had a smallish plantation.

  He said, If you’uns are who I think you are, I talked my way around a rough gang fifty miles back saying they were after the treasure caravan. Said a million in gold would make them all rich for life.

  —And they think we have it? Burton said.

  —Yes.

  V held her hands out, palms up. Said, A million? We can barely feed the children.

  —Yes, ma’am, Biddle said.

  —Talked your way past them, how? Burton said.

  —I claimed to be a dirt farmer.

  —And that’s your plow horse? V said.

  —They didn’t seem like the kind of men who attend to details. I’m just saying, they were questioning people. Asking had I seen a couple of ambulance wagons, a fancy woman and some children and a handful of men.

  V looked at Delrey and under her breath said, Do I look fancy? I sure don’t feel fancy.

  Delrey said, Ma’am, we’re in South Carolina. Who knows their standards?

  —How fast are they traveling? Burton asked.

  Biddle said, Not fast. They’re branching off, talking to people, beating the bushes. They’re searching, not riding hard. But they’re coming faster than you’re going. Maybe they’ll get bored and head on home.

  —Maybe, Burton said. Thank you for the information.

  —If you’re heading to Florida with the rest of us outlaws and you make it to Scrub Pine City down near the Suwannee River, the Biddle place is easy to find, assuming it’s still there.

  He tipped his hat and rode on.

  THAT EVENING as they made camp Ellen sent the children to fetch deadfall for tinder from under a gathering of big oaks. Maggie, being oldest, supervised. Jeffy and Jimmie and Billy picked up sticks and tried to stomp bigger limbs into shorter pieces. Then they got bored and started having saber fights with long, curved pieces of limbs. Soon they were throwing sticks at each other and dashing around yelling and chasing and wrestling until Maggie joined in, whacking at the boys with a switch until they all laughed and screeched. They finally came back to camp with armloads of pencil-thin kindling to throw on the fire and watch flash up and instantly burn away.

  THE NEXT DAY was brilliant spring weather, pastel blue sky and new green leaves on oak trees. The diminished fugitive band spaced out along a hundred yards of muddy South Carolina roadway. Mules and horses plodded heads-down, and the wagon wheels squeaked for grease. They camped out of sight in the woods by a creek. Burton and Delrey went opposite directions looking for food and came back later with little to show.

  —Ma’am?
Delrey said. Our foraging didn’t turn up much. Or let’s be straight and call it begging and bargaining and stealing.

  —Yes?

  —I bought a sack of biscuits and a jug of milk. There wasn’t even a chicken to be had, never mind pig meat. And the people selling wanted a dollar each for a biscuit and a cup of milk, and even then they only sold them paired. Cup of milk and a biscuit, two dollars. But not two cups of milk and a biscuit. Or two biscuits and a cup of milk.

  V interrupted and said, I understand the terms. Let’s split what we have and eat around the fire.

  —There’s more to it, Delrey said. There’s been smallpox aplenty all around here. So we need to know who’s been inoculated. Or else already had smallpox and lived through it, but I guess we’d know that by the scars.

  V said, Everybody but Jimmie and Winnie.

  —I’ll get on it, Burton said.

  AN HOUR LATER he returned to camp, a black boy riding behind him. Nine or ten, tall and skinny and hungry, his finger joints and elbows and knees rising like flower bulbs under the skin. He wore his hair cropped close, almost shaved. The boy stood before them neither scared nor comfortable. He watched all of them, wary and calm. Scattering all down his neck and arms and legs, a hundred fresh pox scars. Each one like the touch of a hot poker, a hundred healing burns, dimpled and silver with a starlike print at the center. Across both cheeks, patterns of scars the Greeks would have connected to make constellations.

  He’d fought it off well. People who died had a thousand blisters and scabs wrapping their bodies, overlapped like reptile scales. Now, down around the boy’s calves and ankles, only a few brown dry scabs remained.

  V said, What is your name?