Varina Read online

  And Mary would probably have something much better than Dover’s, which was not even close to pharmaceutical quality. She called Dover’s housewife morphine, because along with opium it contained fillers like ipecacuanha, which in doses too small to cause vomiting induces sweating, thought to be good for women of fiery temperament. And also potassium sulfate, a laxative. So, a little morphine, a good sweat, and a bowel movement—the cure for everything that ails you.

  V WAITED, but after a time the children still hadn’t settled. Fretting became weeping. Jeffy called her name. And when you’re called you answer, one way or the other.

  V chose yes. She climbed back to the bed and knelt and lit a little brass-and-glass candle lantern. She gathered the children to her, hugging each of them separately and then all together like an enormous stinky bouquet. She held baby Winnie in her lap and began teaching the older children a song—“Alouette”—making a game of it, finding a correspondence between the bucking and swaying of the ambulance and the tub-thumping, foot-stomping rhythm of the song, the accumulating repetitions. Je te plumerai la tête.

  They played along happily for a while, in a language they didn’t know, singing a song of cheerful butchery. All the details of plucking the lovely skylark’s feathers and pulling off its beak and legs and wings, its eyes and head. They all shuffled a little dance for a few moments of joy, shouting not words but sounds, their thin shoulders and angular arms and grubby hands expressing music in jagged movement.

  And then they fell back happy and breathing hard onto the quilts. Soon they fell asleep, except for Jimmie Limber, who lay looking up at candle shadows on the arched canvas. He murmured the doubled three-beat chorus, dropping high to low—Et la tête, et la tête, et les yeux, et les yeux. Over and over.

  V kissed him and said, Sleep, little man.

  —Got us a long night? Jimmie Limber said.

  —We need it to be, V said. If we’re going to make it to Havana.

  She kissed his forehead again and blew out the candle and climbed back over the wagon seat.

  Delrey shifted the reins to one hand and lifted his hat and set it on his lap and scratched the crown of his head. He said, We really going all night?

  —Camp at dawn off in the woods. Become nocturnal as possums, V said.

  * * *

  —Wait, James Blake says. Before you go on, I’m all confused about children. I’m not even imagining this right, much less remembering.

  —Seven often seemed like a lot of children to me too, V says.

  —But I just remember Joe. And a boy around my age and possibly an older girl.

  —You’re conflating Jeffy and Billy. You would have been halfway between them in age. And Maggie was enough older she would have largely ignored you little boys. But this will be easier on paper. Hand me your notebook and pencil.

  James turns to a fresh page and watches as V draws dashes and lines and writes dates and names and place-names. She numbers the names and strikes lines through two of them and swoops a pair of brackets and hands back the open notebook.

  —Attend, please, she says. And then she talks James through the list of names, explaining a family tree. Says, Samuel there, top of the chart, number one? Born in Washington?

  —Yes. With a line through his name.

  —Meaning that when your memory begins, Samuel had been gone ten years. You never knew him. And then Maggie? Number two, also born in Washington. Not struck through, so still alive when your memory begins and the only one alive now. Then Jeffy, born in Washington with no line through his name, so still alive when you came to us, though he passed away more than twenty-five years ago of yellow fever. And now skip down to number six, Billy—also born in Washington and with no line, though he died in Memphis a few years after the war. Diphtheria. Now go back to numbers four and five. Four is Joe, born in Washington, and you’re there bracketed with him because you two were the same age. I have Richmond after your name with a question mark, because I assume that’s where you were born but don’t know for sure. And then finally, number seven, Winnie. Born in Richmond right after Joe died and a crying lap-baby when we ran south. She died nearly eight years ago.

  V says, The point I’m making is that Joe’s death is your memory’s year zero—spring, 1864.

  She reaches to his notebook and turns back the page corner and says, For future reference.

  —Did one of the boys have black hair and a cannon? James asks.

  —See, conflation. Billy was the only child with my dark hair, and Jeffy had a miniature cannon. The neighbors complained constantly that he was knocking chunks of plaster off their walls. It shot iron balls the size of big marbles, and the black powder sent up clouds of smoke. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill somebody. Ellen was the only one who could wrangle the bunch of you, which is why I moved her up from the kitchen to the nursery. She could soothe you all to sleep at night and reason with you during the day to make you mind her. At most, if she was really mad, she would snatch you boys up by your collars onto your tiptoes to get your attention. I was never good at reasoning with children. I either gave hugs and kisses or impatient swats on the bottom.

  James looks at his notebook and says, It’s so much, seeing all these names together. So many children passed on. I can’t imagine.

  —Yes, I still sometimes hear those slow drumbeats, V says. Dirt clods striking small coffin lids muffled with straw. I grieved, of course. When Samuel died, I couldn’t leave the house for two or three months. But he was my first and only child then. Later, deaths fell differently because living children need so much from you, and you can’t indulge yourself and collapse into grief. Like with Joe—six weeks later Winnie arrived. Unless you’re just worthless, you get up and put on the black dress and keep going.

  V tells James how her children had died, scattered from New York to Washington to Richmond to Memphis, but had been dug up and dragged to Richmond to surround their father’s monument. And of course Jeff was dug up from New Orleans and dragged there too. Even before he was dead yet, businessmen and governments from Georgia and Kentucky and Mississippi and Virginia tried to offer her deals for possession of the body when the time came. Bragging how they would make his obelisk taller and grander than Washington’s. And that’s not even factoring the money they offered her to seal the deal. But a hill in Hollywood Cemetery above the James River seemed the right choice, seasoned with the irony that she hated Richmond because it was where they met their apocalypse. And because Joe already waited by himself down the green hill.

  Soon, she will be hauled there too, not that she cares one way or the other about graves. She imagines a little flat paving stone the dimensions of a shoe-box lid without even a name—just WIFE & MOTHER and a bracket of dates. Every sunny day, the shadow of his tall statue will cross over her like the gnomon of a sundial, like a blade.

  —One thing I am sure of, though, V says to James. I’ll never return to Richmond until it’s feetfirst in a box.

  * * *

  Jimmie Limber came to the back of the wagon seat and reached to put a hand on V’s arm. Not a word, just a touch—at which, she helped him climb over and sat him next to her and pulled him against her by his bony shoulder.

  She said, Jimmie, do you need something?

  —Nope. Can’t sleep.

  —Cold?

  —Nope.

  —Not scared, are you?

  —I don’t scare.

  —Of course not, V said.

  —Just want to watch the road.

  Delrey said, I hope you can see it better than I can, Jimmie. We’ve run off into the pines three times already tonight. The mules can’t tell woods and cornfields from road much better than I can.

  —I see real good, Jimmie said.

  —Well, V said.

  —Yes, ma’am. Real well.

  He watched down the road awhile and then said, Mighty dark to travel.

  V said, We’re deep in the world here, Jimmie.

  He sat with her arm draped acr
oss his shoulders. If she tried to hug him too long he squirmed, but sometimes he rested his head against her, breathing deep but always awake and watching.

  —I believe the road’s about to bear left, he’d say. Long straightaway coming after a creek crossing. Might be a burned-out house after that. I can smell it.

  He predicted little better than Delrey or the mules or V did, which is to say about like blind chance. But he tried hard.

  Jimmie said, How far is it we’re going?

  V said, A hundred miles, and then a hundred miles more. Who knows how many times after that? Maybe a boat trip somewhere along the way. You boys will enjoy that.

  —Keep going till we stop?

  —Can you do that, Jimmie?

  He thought about it a long time and then said, I’ll try it.

  V said, If you’ll watch out for me, I’ll watch out for you.

  He stuck out his hand to shake on the deal. Little clammy palm.

  V shook and then said, A kiss on the cheek too.

  He turned his head and angled his cheek for a kiss.

  She said, No, I meant you kiss me.

  She turned her cheek, and he made a quick peck.

  An hour before dawn started showing in the sky, Jimmie Limber faded away to sleep and V held him against her with both arms awhile for her own benefit and then lifted him back to the fragrant tick mattress and patchwork quilts with the others. Under the canvas, their bedding cast an odor of overripe fruit, though they’d had no fruit for weeks, unless you counted half-rotted winter squash.

  V dissolved pinches of Dover’s into a metal cup with a splash of red wine. She wanted to time it so the opium rose in her with the dawn. Both coming on in gradations of blue and gray like a bruise swelling above the pines.

  LA FLORIDA. V sat on the wagon bench and looked down the road like it might appear around the next bend. Her mind kept circling back to when she was seventeen—two decades ago—wondering how she got from there to here. Thinking how all the lesser increments of time between then and now—years, months, days, hours, moments—drained constantly into the black sump where time resides after it’s been used up, whether used well or squandered.

  A part of her believed this one moment—Carolina woods, a wagonload of children, lights of heaven blazing on a clear spring night—was sufficient. An eternity in itself. A perfect instant if you erased guilt of the past and dread of the future. One key lay in not weighing the many impending threats and losses against grand past moments left behind, diminishing by the mile. Just breathe night air, listen to owls hoot, and be happy while it lasts. The dead are dead. Be happy for a wagonload of live children.

  Glory aplenty through those past couple of decades, though. Several presidents—mostly dead now—thinking she was awfully pretty and smart and witty. That first stretch of time in Washington, she’d been eighteen, new wife of shiny new congressman Jeff, and thrilled to go to parties at the Polk White House and write her mother comic letters about how everyone dressed and how short and inconsequential Polk looked.

  Another time, during her second era in Washington—so V was midtwenties and wife of the secretary of war—President Pierce walked alone from the real White House in a whirling snowstorm and knocked at the door and came in frosted top to bottom. He wore a heavy blue wool coat, military style with tall collars standing up to the tops of his ears. He lacked a hat, and his hair—usually a wavy voluminous mess—drooped slick and wet against the sides of his skull like the ears of a spaniel fresh from the water. He had been drinking as usual and stood in the foyer taking his coat off, apologizing for the puddle of snowmelt around his boots.

  His pretext for the visit had been to ask about her health. A rumor ran around town that she had fallen fatally bronchial. Which was totally untrue, and he knew it. But he was lonely and wanted to sit by a friendly fire for an hour and have a few more drinks and talk to people who liked him and had read all the same books he had read plus plenty more.

  That president and his wife—just before making the trip from New Hampshire to Washington for the inaugural ceremony—had been broken irreparably by witnessing their young boy, their last living child, run down beneath the engine of a train. The bloody horror of that violent meeting between massive mechanical steam-powered force and a small biologic body—a thin bag of skin over meat and organs and nerves and brittle bones—required no embellishment. They rushed to the boy, who lay like he was asleep, and then they took his cap off, and the top of his head was unspeakable. That instant left its image of loss stamped on their faces and on their souls forever, and not even the highest office in the land could erase or even partially reimburse them.

  As Pierce waded haltingly into the swamp of absolute politics that slavery created, his wife, Jane, chose to stay upstairs in the White House, trying to learn the skill of invisibility. People—meaning the press up and down the country and all those newspaper readers who believe everything they see in print—entertained themselves spreading gossip that she was insane, a crazy woman holed up in the attic. Famous women wild in their minds—even very quietly and privately—sell newspapers.

  And of course the gossip was completely untrue in regard to Jane’s insanity. During a state dinner or a party or a dance—whatever they called it that night—V ventured upstairs sleuthing. And what she found was a smart, sad woman, deeply sane, tiny inside her big dress, face the color of a bleached bedsheet except around the eyes and cheekbones where it yellowed to old ivory. V discovered that Jane stayed upstairs because she had more serious and encompassing thoughts and emotions than could be contained in a White House gathering. She sat in a parlor surrounded by books, reading fairly desperately for pertinent helpful passages that might make sense of her broken life. She coughed sometimes into a handkerchief and, not looking at it, carefully folded the cloth without revealing what V later knew would have been a bright smear of lung blood. They talked about books, of course. V recommended a couple of her favorite Greeks, and Jane asked for justification, the basis of her recommendation. V said that in her opinion, when the old Greek writers committed to cutting, they drove bone-deep with the first stroke. She suggested translations other than the current popular ones. Subtle matters like how they handled onomatopoeia, which the Greeks spewed all over the page.

  Thereafter when V called at the White House, Jane never sent down a servant with a polite excuse. Sometimes they sat by the fire and had tea and talked between long intervals of silence. V learned that if she needed to fill the air with the sound of her own voice, she would never know what Jane thought about anything. Ask a question and then wait a quarter of a minute for an answer, an interval filled with thought. When Jane asked difficult questions in regard to Sophocles, V tried to answer with substance, having the advantage of reading the texts in their original language with help from a lexicon, though at the time she lacked sufficient experience of loss to understand them fully.

  On days when Jane looked especially drained, eyes puffy, V’s attempts to rouse her failed—just the chatter a young woman imagines to be engaging for a woman whose children had all died. On those visits, V looked Jane in the eyes and kissed her on both cheeks and said, See you soon.

  Every visit—last thing, V’s hand on the doorknob—Jane always said, Thank you, dear girl, for remembering me. Much later, after the deaths of her own children, V believed she went just as far away from life as Jane, except that all of her didn’t stay gone forever.

  Then in four years came the inevitable next election. The wonderful drunk president didn’t exactly lose the vote, because he was not even renominated by his own party. So, shortly, a new president was elected. And the thing about becoming president is that you don’t just get your predecessor’s job, you also get his house. V went to the White House to see if she could help pack or do anything whatsoever helpful. Jane kissed her and held her hand as they walked around, trying to make moving decisions. Jane looked at the sitting room upstairs and said, It is all beyond my knowledge.

  T
he next president entered office in deep mourning too. In his case every day marked the loss of . . . what? A roommate? An old friend? The friend’s name was King. Back when he and Buchanan were both members of the House they had lived together ten years in Brown’s Hotel as roommates. Under unusual circumstances King became vice president to Pierce for a few weeks and swore his oath of office in Havana and then died almost immediately afterward.

  Back in the Brown’s Hotel days—before King was vice president and long before Buchanan was president—Andrew Jackson—a brutal piece of work even if you were trying to be complimentary—liked to call the pair Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy. Every piece of correspondence between Buchanan and King was burned after King’s death.

  Buchanan never married. A pretty and very shrewd and sharp-eyed niece—who didn’t particularly approve of V—served as hostess, arranging state dinners and gracefully whispering in her uncle’s ear the names of people in the receiving line he might have misremembered. She was expert at diverting the attention of unwelcome or tiring guests, as if she were dealing with a parade of fussy toddlers. Some newspaper writer, not knowing what to call her, since she wasn’t the president’s wife, made up the term First Lady, and it stuck.

  Old Buchanan and V eventually became true friends without reference to her husband—then a senator. Or to her age—still shy of thirty. They were the kind of friends who gave each other bedroom slippers for Christmas. The sharper her tongue, the more he delighted in it. He was a lovely, lonely old bachelor, and V was so often at her best with older men. When he lay dying he sent for her, and she sat on the edge of his bed to say good-bye. His hair sprung greasy from his temples, white peaks and gray valleys. He held her hand and patted its smooth back with his old crepey palm and tried to console her.