Varina Read online

  Florida told how they had left town under a cackle of rumor and slur. Oldest daughter a thin crescent of new moon older than the teen wife. Three daughters not from the same mother and no corresponding certificates of marriage or death or, heaven forbid, divorce.

  —Doesn’t clarify anything that all of us look alike. Far as I’m concerned, people in Natchez can call us all bastards and leave it at that. Maybe we entered the world in the Delta or some Louisiana swamp where they do things different. Old Joe tells Eliza she is his first wife, but who knows? None of us have even vague memories of mothers. And about all Joe wants out of any of us, including Eliza, is to leave him alone. He’s never cared if we knew whether the earth was flat or not as long as we could at minimum read and write. But he doesn’t stop us when we educate ourselves out of his books. Which are about four-fifths boring law books, so I hope one of your trunks is full of literature. How’s that for a start?

  V said, Must have been quite the steamboat trip up from Natchez that first time.

  Florida laughed and said, So you’re really saying no wonder Old Joe looks like he’s seventy when he’s really fifty-five.

  —Really?

  —What he claims.

  V said, But he must be your father, yes?

  Florida said, The rule here is, no assumptions. We don’t spend time wondering if Old Joe is our natural daddy and how many mothers are involved. And we sure don’t ask. You saw how he gets. But yes, he’s my father. Whoever my mother was, she made him believe I was his. I don’t know facts, and probably there aren’t any to know. Whatever crazy thing people want to believe, that’s what they call it, a fact. I do know that however hard you try, you can’t see inside the tangle of somebody else’s love—or whatever uglier word applies—not deep enough to make sense of it. Whoever my mother was, she either died right after I was born or else ran off. Old Joe didn’t run, and that counts. And if I’m not his daughter by blood, maybe it counts even more.

  Florida paused and said, Now, you tell one.

  V said, Well, I’ve been in love with my tutor for years. And at your dock today, he kissed me on the lips.

  —Ha, Florida said. If we had a tutor, all four of us would be climbing over each other’s backs to kiss him. I mean a real secret.

  —All right, V said. But I’ll warn you nothing is as boring as other people’s dreams and finances. I think I’m here because of my father’s money troubles and his old friendship with Joseph. Everybody’s mad at my father in Natchez.

  —Now there you go, Florida said. That’s a start.

  So V told Florida what she knew. About how her father thought he was much better with money than he really was, how he invested like a gambler, always sure his luck was about to turn. Except it never did. How they went from a rich round of parties at the grand houses of Natchez to being stricken from everybody’s invitation list due to WB’s owing money to half the wealthy men in Natchez after talking them into various failing schemes and partnerships and outright loans. How they would have gone under except for distant family buying their best paintings and a pair of really fine carriage horses and other valuable objects those aunts and uncles had their eyes on for some time. Except afterward, those relatives started acting like they owned her family because they finally got what they wanted at a bargain price.

  —Gone under, Florida said. That’s a drowning metaphor, and death by water is said to be a bad way to go.

  —The only wisdom my father has ever passed along to me was, Borrow all you can when interest rates are low and use other people’s money to invest, V said.

  She went on talking, telling Florida that the main part of WB’s mess that struck home at fifteen and sixteen was that invitations to the better dances and parties dwindled to nothing, all those social occasions where advantageous matches between young people were negotiated. Very quickly—without anyone having to say a word—she understood that she had become not the least bit advantageous. She had nothing but herself as dowry. And that fundamental offering was not really in demand. Too tall, too dark, too slim, too educated, too opinionated. Also prone to moods. And yet, until now, her family had traveled only within the highest levels of Natchez society, so no handsome, honest planter with a thousand acres but no pretensions—poorly educated but smart and teachable—would have dared approach her, even if willing to overlook all her liabilities.

  —Information to think on, Florida said. Old Joe’s always figuring his next move. Twiddling his fingers over a fan of cards, which one to pull from his hand and throw down. Maybe a knave of hearts.

  THE FOURTH MORNING OF THE VISIT, V and Florida sat in rockers on the lower front gallery talking favorite novels. The younger girls sat under a tree in the yard playing a game of cards that sometimes involved throwing them all in the air.

  Florida said, I have to be so careful with novels. Important to pace myself with them. I love words more than anything or anybody, but my mind is a feather in the wind. So I mostly read poems. A novel drains me entirely. More than one a month and I start getting dark under the eyes. After Nick of the Woods, I didn’t sleep for a week.

  Florida had been V’s refuge from the challenges of conversing with equally dour Old Joseph and young Eliza. Sometimes, rarely, when an old man—gray and bald and paunchy and blotchy—marries a much younger woman, he becomes younger too, like having her at his side equals a draft of black Gypsy potion or crystal water from Ponce de León’s magic fountain. That’s what old men want desperately to believe. With Joseph and Eliza, it went the opposite way, as it generally does—Joseph kept being old and Eliza became old. Though she was barely V’s elder—and thus her age still ended in teen for the next couple of months—Eliza acted like an awful granny who had turned grim rather than feisty with age. V’s opinion was, give me an old wrinkled woman with a blistering tongue any day to a young beaten dog hump-shouldered by the fireside hoping for death to grant release. To Eliza’s credit, though, she could still rally to give V the bright, jealous side-eye when she looked particularly pretty at the dinner table.

  So V said to Florida, Why would a girl Eliza’s age marry her grandfather?

  Florida laughed and said, To be fair, we don’t know for certain that Old Joe’s her grandfather.

  V blushed, but one of the benefits of being brownish is that often nobody notices.

  V said, I apologize. That’s not what I meant. It was an expression. You hear all kinds of rumors around Natchez, some of them about my own family. Hardly any with a particle of truth.

  Florida patted her arm and said, Easy down, girl. We’re past that now. I don’t know about you, but there’s probably plenty of truth in what they say about us.

  V said, One way or the other, I guess we’re both outlaws. Fled to the wilderness, or driven to it.

  Florida said, Let’s kiss on that, like blood brothers.

  Florida leaned and pecked V on the cheek. And then when V leaned to peck her back, Florida turned her face and kissed V on the mouth.

  And then V was certain Florida saw the blush.

  Florida laughed and said, Oh, you’re gonna take a lot of breaking in. But while you cool off, I’ll go back to your question about Eliza and Joe. The answer’s easy. Some women feel like, if they’ve got to marry they want to marry the biggest, strongest, richest bear in the woods. Even if that bear’s old and grumpy and shaggy and stinks, he’s your big bear. He’s won a lot of battles to be where he is, and he’s not going down easy. Eliza’s that kind of woman. And I’m not criticizing. I haven’t figured out which kind of woman I am. Maybe that kind.

  V sat quiet within her seventeen-year-old self, thinking about the handsome woodcutter.

  —THE MAN WHO DROVE ME from the river, Benjamin Montgomery. I see him all over the place. One minute he’s here in the house coming in and out of the library and the office, then he’s on horseback studying the fields, then around the barns checking inventory of hay and feed. Always busy, always writing notes in a little book.

  —Yes?


  —Well, what is his job?

  —A little bit of everything. Mostly, Ben stays busy making himself indispensable.

  Florida explained how some while back, Joseph bought Ben out of Virginia, just across the Potomac from Washington. He arrived in Mississippi knowing how to read and write, and he was especially good with numbers. Then before long Ben began drawing architectural plans for outbuildings with compasses and rulers and squares. He learned how to survey land in no time—all that complicated business of rods and chains and that strange device on its tripod. But before all that, Ben hadn’t been at the Bend much over a month when he ran. He was caught in Vicksburg trying to pass as free, looking for a job on a northbound riverboat. When he got hauled back to Davis Bend, Joseph didn’t whip him. They had a meeting in the office, just the two of them, and the way they both tell it, Joseph asked Ben to name the source of his displeasure. Ben said he preferred the city life.

  —Oh, please, V said. My experience may be limited, but I won’t believe just anything. That is not the way it goes.

  —I’m not making this up. They worked out some compromise between them. Soon Benjamin was married to a pretty girl named Edella and was keeping the books for all Joseph’s holdings and running the plantation store—eventually with a cut of the profits. He has free run of Joseph’s library and collects books of his own. Gets paid cash for some of his work, and uses some of his money to buy Edella’s time back from Joseph—so she can stay home and care for their new baby. He’s made himself so necessary to the running of The Hurricane that Joseph’s recently taken out a fat insurance policy on his life. Joseph can leave for any stretch of time and Ben runs the whole place, and writes reports and asks permission for big expenditures but decides the smaller ones himself.

  —You’re making all this up.

  —Am not. This place is strange aplenty.

  V FIRST SAW UNCLE JEFF riding through the front gates of The Hurricane on a thoroughbred, a chestnut mare, her coat gleaming when the sun hit. He was a fine horseman—perfect equitation, straight relaxed posture in the saddle—though she saw he was showing off, using a lot of leg urging the mare forward and at the same time using the reins to hold her back, collecting her energy and releasing it, trying to make her look harder to ride than she was. But still, he looked beautiful on a horse. Even during the war when he was tired and sick and half blind, he rode for hours almost daily.

  V guessed he was about her mother’s age—late thirties—and was surprised he could still maintain so athletic an aspect. Once he set foot on the ground, though, he lost something and became just a slim, middle-size man. She noticed right away his stacked boot heels lifting him an inch higher than reality and wondered what that might say about him, whether he was a fop or had a streak of bantam rooster in him.

  The more she saw as he handed the reins to a bondman and walked to the house, the real issue wasn’t really his height. It was his slightness, how finespun his bones must be. Later—bad times during the war and worse times after—he didn’t eat much and wouldn’t have gone a hundred twenty even after one of Mary Chesnut’s feasts, when oysters and turkeys and ducks and doves and bowls of fresh vegetables cooked shiny in pork fat appeared magically out of the scarcity of war. But that first moment she saw him, he carried a little more muscle, say one-forty.

  Just before Jeff walked within earshot, Florida said, very dry and ironic, Your Romantic poet arrives. Then she raised her voice so that Jeff could hear her say, Oh, look! He’s out of mourning at last.

  V turned to Florida in confusion, and Florida laughed at the confusion she intended to create.

  Then to Jeff, Florida said, Good Lord, brighten up. You’re here to meet a pretty girl, not be the subject for a hanging. Cousin Jeffy, darling, I keep trying to tell you how to avoid that preying viper melancholy. It’s simple. Follow my six commandments. Cherish ambition. Cherish pride. Don’t mope. Dismiss the past, because it’s gone for good. Do not defer pleasure whenever and wherever it rears its smiling face. Run from excitement to excitement until the clock winds down. But you can’t seem to learn any but the second commandment. You’re the damned slowest student in the class.

  Jeff glanced at V as Florida talked, and then he climbed the steps and removed his flat-brimmed hat and kissed Florida’s cheeks. All smiles and manners—he welcomed V with a quick touch of hands. His hair lay mashed all around by the hatband, and he ran his fingers through it. He wore an unusual cravat, brighter and puffier and more patterned than the current fashion, a sort of peachy color, and it wrapped his neck almost to his sharp jawline. He wore not a hint of black.

  Florida swept her hand toward another rocker and said, Join us, Cousin. Since that’s why you saddled your best horse and rode all this way.

  —Uncle, he said.

  Florida, acting for just the audience of V and Jeff, said, That always sounds so strange, calling you Uncle, since my daddy is more like your daddy than your brother. I’ve decided from now on we’re going to ignore our ridiculous family tree. Too much complication. Girls so young and Old Joe so old. And you’re tending in that direction too if we don’t do something about it. I plan to young you up. As relationships go, Uncle sounds old and imposes a distance and protocol, sets limits that Cousin doesn’t. Way out here in the jungle, I understand cousins even marry now and then. So no arguments, no witness testimony. I’ve adjudicated the matter. We’re all of us cousins except Old Daddy Joe.

  V laughed at Florida, and Jeff looked at V, uncomfortable and embarrassed and a little angry.

  He recovered and said, Miss Howell, by now you’ve probably learned that anything Cousin Florida says is suspect.

  And then to Florida he said, Where is Old Joe? I have a business matter.

  —Of course you do. He’s in the office, but you know that. He lives there. Why don’t you show V our steam-powered cotton gin. She’s only been shown it twice since she got here.

  Jeff shook his head and kept walking. After he passed through the front door, Florida turned to look at V.

  All it took was a lift of eyebrow on V’s part and Florida started spilling a story.

  She told how Jeff’s first little wife, Knoxie, remained close in his heart long after her death, her loss haunting him to the extent that he had lived in almost hermitic seclusion for nearly a decade. How in the early days of mourning—after Jeff and Pemberton went to Havana to sketch and read and recover from her loss and Jeff got arrested as a spy by the Cubans because he sketched too many fortifications—he and Pemberton had lived like savages out on Brierfield, going a month at a time without sticking their heads out of their hole—living in nearly identical log cabins they built themselves. It was just Jeff and Pemberton and a few slaves. Jeff would turn up his sleeves and clear land all day like he didn’t care if he worked himself to death or anybody else either. Florida said that Jeff and Pemberton had been together since before West Point, and after graduation—because Jeff’s grades were poor and a few of the faculty wrote scathing letters of evaluation—they found themselves stationed way up in the northwest wilderness. Nothing but dark fir forests and cold rivers, and frontier forts. Stockades of palings with the bark left on, the top ends sharpened to points with axes, like rows of upright primitive pencils. Otherwise just bears and wolves and Indians and British and French moving south out of Canada. Then before long Knoxie and Jeff fell in love. Her daddy, Zachary Taylor, was the officer in charge of the fort and didn’t want his daughter to marry a soldier, or at least didn’t want her to marry Cousin Jeff. So Jeff quit the army. They ran off and got married with none of her people there, and headed down the river on their honeymoon. Before they made it to New Orleans, they both got sick, and she died but he did not. That song “The Fairy Bells”—she was singing it when she died in his arms. At least that was the story. And he’d been wearing some degree of mourning ever since—seven years—until today.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, Jeff invited V to ride with him and have a look at Brierfield. The Hurricane’
s horse barn was two dozen stalls at least, filled with beautiful Kentucky thoroughbreds. V walked to the barn in what she had always worn riding since she started at five or six, a split skirt for sitting astride. She rode well due to lessons and lots of lonely hours along the bluffs of the Mississippi, jumping gullies and fallen trees.

  Jeff looked at her with some concern. He said, We’ll need to retack. I’ve had a sidesaddle ready for you on a reliable gelding, very calm.

  V walked down the barn aisle and saw a bay mare looking white-eyed out of the stall. V held out the back of her hand and the horse leaned her velvet nose and took a deep breath and relaxed her ears, though she kept tossing her head and then made one quick spin in the stall and came back to breathe V’s hand.

  V said, Her, please.

  THEY RODE OUT to Brierfield side by side, sometimes at a walk and sometimes racing along past stretches of woods and big empty fields and pastures and smaller fields of cool weather crops—greens and root vegetables mostly. During the walking, they talked about the personalities of horses and about his house. The nearer they came to Brierfield the more Jeff apologized for his miscalculations in the design. He aspired to equal his namesake in every regard, and this was only his first attempt as architect.

  When they arrived, V saw that he was right to apologize. The house was no Monticello. Just a plastered cat-and-clay construction without even a real chimney of stone or brick, just more cat-and-clay. The house lacked a gallery and made do with an awkwardly proportioned stoop sheltering the front door. The windows sat high on the walls and very small.

  A black man, middle-aged, met them in the yard and held V’s mare as she dismounted. He stood a couple of inches taller than Jeff, nearly as slim, and he wore about the same clothes Jeff did, except a little more worn. And a fine Panama hat frazzled at the front edge of the brim. Long fingers with big joints. Unless he was being addressed, his eyes looked into the middle distance like a hunter with a gun in his hands waiting.