The boy looked off to the woods line, judging distance. He said, I don’t have one.
—Yes, you do, Ellen said. Is it John? Benjamin? Samuel?
—No, ma’am. It’s Bobcat.
Ellen shrugged and went back to the fire.
—Well, Bobcat, V said, I’ll take your word on that. I see you’ve been sick.
He looked her in the eye and raised his chin and said, Better now.
—Yes, you are. You’re going to be fine and live to be a hundred. You’re strong. But those last scabs down your legs could help keep my children from dying. I’d pay you for a few of them.
The boy looked down at his scabby legs and bare feet and then looked up, more wary than before.
—They fall off in the dirt. Glad to get shut of them. But you want to buy them off me?
—It would be a favor, V said. I’ll give you three biscuits or three dollars for three of them.
Bobcat thought a second and said, Both. Three biscuits for now and money for later. Hard money, not grayboy paper.
V said, Three big dry ones and we have a deal.
Bobcat squatted and picked around at his shins and ankles until he found loose scabs, domed and puckered and brown, gritty as sandpaper. They lifted from the pink scarred skin underneath with the first pull of a fingernail. He held them in his cupped palm.
V reached out her hand, but Bobcat stepped back.
—We trading or what? he said.
—Yes, we are trading.
Bobcat looked around at the white faces aimed his way.
—Then fill your hand too, ma’am, he said.
V stacked the biscuits in her hand and held them out to Bobcat.
He shoved them in his pockets but kept his fist clenched around the scabs.
—Yes? she asked.
—I gotta have my money, he said.
V said, Of course. I apologize for my forgetfulness.
She counted out the coins and reached them to him.
Bobcat grabbed the money and dumped the scabs into her hand and took off running fast for the woods.
Delrey watched him go and said, That child can mortally fly.
V took the brown scabs and crushed them to beige powder in a teacup with the back of a silver spoon, and then spilled the powder onto a saucer and pursed her lips and puffed the powder up the noses of Jimmie and Winnie, knowing they would get sick and might possibly die. Many people reacted to the inoculation with a slight fever and that was it—no smallpox for them. Some raised a few blisters and quickly got better. A scant few percent became very sick and passed to the next world. Like everyone inoculating, V was figuring odds, gambling. If Jimmie or Winnie took the actual pox full-on, they had less than fifty-fifty odds of living. With the inoculation, nine out of ten lived. When V finished, Winnie howled in outrage. Jimmie blinked watery eyes and stood with his fists clenched until V kissed him on the forehead and sent him back to Billy and Jeffy, squatting by the fire.
V bowed her head slightly to the north and then to the east. Praising Boston and Africa. Cotton Mather’s slave Onesimus had taught him how to do it, how to powder the scabs and blow them up the nose. Or make a shallow cut in the skin and rub the powder in. Something they did back in Africa. Yankees put much stock in the famous Puritan witch-killer Mather, and V had read plenty of that crazy old man’s thoughts, all the fear and dread he cursed America with down to the tenth generation. But Yankees loved to claim relation with him and all those other fanatics that came over here to establish their own flavor of dictatorship led by preacher tyrants. Winchester had made V read their writings, and even at fifteen she believed the English were right. Those people needed to be locked up. But instead, they ran to the wilderness and found the freedom to be as crazy as they wanted and to kill Indians and bothersome witch women and to drive a poison nail into the head of this country that still hasn’t been pulled out.
THE HOUSE IN ABBEVILLE stood in the Y where Main Street divides. A large, pretty house, its two-acre wedge of land filled with green lawn and foundation azaleas blooming scarlet and purple and white. The fugitives arrived an hour after dark, tired and dingy and hungry. Smelling like campfire and worse. The house rose before them like a white monument from a lost world. It belonged to Armistead Burt, and he didn’t worry about Federal retaliation for offering hospitality to old friends on the run.
V held Winnie, who had taken a fever for half a day but seemed to be getting better. Jimmie had only one little pox welt under his chin. He and the other children peered out from the ambulance bed with aspects like the force of a great explosion had recently passed over them. Burton, his eyes dead in his face, sat hunched and braced with both hands on the pommel, his elbows locked to hold the weight of his torso.
V said, You’re tingling from fatigue like the rest of us.
—No, Burton said. I’m fine. He sat up straight.
—Just claim it, V said. I know you’ll ride till you fall out of the saddle, but at this point, denying is nothing but young-man pride.
—All right. I could use supper and a washcloth and a basin of warm water and a ten-hour nap.
Yellow lamplight behind the muntins and stiles of the windows projected geometric figures onto the dark lawn. The front door burst open and Mary Chesnut came flowing out. She hollered in her thin little-woman voice, Where the hell have you fools been? I’d have called for the home guard to go find you, except they’ve all run off to surrender and sign the loyalty oath. We wondered if the rounders and outliers had swarmed you. Good Lord, come here to me. We haven’t hugged in months. We’ve got food and wine and hot water and clean beds. The men and children can all fall out when they want, but you can’t sleep until at least one in the morning because I’ve so many questions that need answers. The Burts aren’t due back for a few days. They went to see if their house in Columbia burned along with most of the town—and mine too. They left me in charge, since they’re running the house like a refuge hotel until we all get home or get arrested or make a clean getaway.
—I’m so tired, V said.
—You never said that when we were nineteen in Washington City, Mary Chesnut said.
—I’ll do my best, V said, rallying. In fact, I’ll set my goal to put you to bed with a kiss on the forehead when the sun comes up, like I’ve done so many times before.
—You all clean up and we’ll eat and then we’ll put the weak ones to bed and meet in the parlor, she said. I’ll have wine and suchlike.
EARLY ON WHEN SHE AND MARY MET in Washington—both teens married to congressmen, living and dining in Brown’s Hotel and calling it their mess—they were famous enemies for the first month. Too much alike and neither used to sharing the attention that came with being young and smart and pretty. Every evening the sound of their crossfire over the dinner table was only partially muffled by laughter. Each of them made a dramatic public show of tolerating the other. Then they had a cup of tea—just the two of them, no audience—and it took about ten minutes to make peace, and before long they began getting together in their rooms before parties to comment on how their dresses hung.
Back then Mary’s housemaid, Phoebe, said to V, Missus Mary won’t ever get no babies.
—Why? V said.
—Too narrow across the hips.
Phoebe held her hands up, faced her palms about eight inches apart. Which was a slight exaggeration. But whether for that reason or some other, over the years of Mary’s marriage, Phoebe’s prophecy proved true. As far as V knew, Mary had never been even briefly pregnant, much less carried a child to term.
V too went long years without producing a child, but the reason was no mystery to her. Then for a few years she had babies one right after the other. So, she was different because of children, beaten up by having them and loving them and losing them.
Mary, though, had retained that frail girl shape, still looked slightly like a child who had raided her mother’s closet to try on her best dress. If you looked hard, Mary’s face had slightly broadened,
maybe. Wrinkles no deeper than the light crescent press of a fingernail mark against the skin around her mouth and eyes. Under the powder, her color grayed some, but the backs of her hands remained smooth as a teen’s. She still knew so much, having time every day to read as many books and periodicals as she wanted, and to sit around in parlors chatting with witty smart people keeping her on her toes. So to some degree Mary remained nineteen forever—bright and promising, her body intact and her mind free from the permanent grief of seeing your group of babies begin to dwindle away, leaving your wit hard to retrieve and permanently darkened.
MARY TOOK OUT a plump wax paper packet and tore off the corner and tapped a pinch into her red wine and gave it a swirl.
She said, It’s so nice not to have to make excuses. Would you care for some?
—All the rest, please, V said. She reached out her glass.
Mary ripped the packet wide open and shook until the last grains fell, and then she poured them both a splash more wine.
—That will give you some relief, she said. Though I had an accident with it a while back. I sent Phoebe to the doctor to pick up my supplies, and he told her to mix the contents with a glass of red wine. The part Phoebe forgot was that he meant for her to divide the package into doses twice a day for a week, so she mixed it all at once. I remember thinking the wine tasted gritty. Three days and nights I slept uninterrupted, and on the fourth day I woke up much refreshed. The doctor said that killing me would take a lot of effort—which I’ve noted in my journal as an epitaph to be chiseled into my gravestone or an epigraph should I publish my book. But who has the time for that now?
They sat and sipped and talked. It was past midnight, silent outside until a rider went by at a canter, and they stopped to listen as he took the western branch of the road into deep country.
Mary said, It’s all second- and thirdhand, but I hear the end times in Richmond fell pretty bad.
V sat awhile and finally said, Do you think the gods observe us?
—Lowercase plural, or big G singular?
—Either.
Mary said, If you mean watch over us all worried, making sure that everything happens for a reason, then I’ll say hell no. But if you mean punish us whether we deserve a beating or not, I’ll say maybe.
—I mean observe, V said. Form an audience. Judge us mostly on how amusing we are. How funny or sad or tragic or foolish. Or just to find us lacking in entertainment—a disappointment.
—More like a group of critics?
—Maybe. Because however bad we’ve all been—whether the gods jump on us with both feet or the Puritan God fries us in a red-hot skillet—all of us, we’ve made a story of our lives.
—Oh, Mary said, life is mostly just what happens. Choice or chance or fate, gods or not. Like it or not. Things happen, we do what we think is in our best interests or just convenient, and then we live with the consequences. When we finally start taking the long view back down the road we’ve traveled, maybe we repent. Or just dig in our heels and claim righteousness no matter how damning the evidence against us.
Mary stopped and said, But that’s not what we’re talking about, is it? You’re thinking about him, yes? His ruin.
—Some. But also about myself and the children.
—And wherever Jeff is right now, he’s probably worrying more about how he’ll be judged by history.
—Yes.
Mary drank and thought and then raised her glass and professed, History reveals a person’s deeds—their outward character but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life rounded by a dream—unpenetrated, unguessed.
V clapped two slow claps and said, Beyond the Shakespeare, is any of that yours?
—The first part, a little.
V said, I’m fading. Coffee?
—Everyone’s gone to bed. We could make some fresh or drink the cold dregs left in the pot from dinner.
—I vote dregs. All I want is a jolt. I still aim to tuck you in.
IN THAT DEGREE of late night transforming to early morning—the oil lamp slightly haloed by the heavy, wet April air gathering outside—Mary said, Young Mister Burton Harrison? He looks worn out. But I imagine when he’s had a shave and not dead-on-his-feet exhausted, he’s probably handsome.
—Well, yes.
Mary studied V and then closed her eyes for two breaths. She said, I’m sensing a story, and we’re both too tired to make me drag it out of you when we both know you’ll spill eventually.
Very dreamy, slow and with many pauses and diversions, V remembered aloud how in the Gray House, Burton’s office was upstairs, just across a narrow hall from her little sitting and dressing room off the big master bedroom. Her room measured perhaps ten by ten. Burton’s office was even smaller, with no exterior windows. But it was an intense space, dim even in daylight, books on shelves and standing in tottering stacks, papers everywhere, desktop covered with letters in his meticulous hand. In her room—whether she had the door open and sat in the chair reading a book or had the door closed drawing up a stocking—she could hear him clear his throat. Coming and going, they often brushed against each other in the narrow hall between their lairs.
Mary Chesnut sat with her eyes closed, the stem of her glass between the first and middle fingers of her upturned hand, her palm cupping the bowl. V paused, and Mary, without opening her eyes, said, Please proceed.
So, of course, V and Burton shared a lovely, brief flirtation. He had graduated from Yale before the war and frequently made calculated glancing mentions that he was a Bonesman, as if that shed more than a glimmer of golden light south of about Delaware. V grew up around Masons, whose magical tickling handshakes and dark secrets went back to King Solomon, so a recently formed boy club hardly registered. More interesting to her was she and Burton being several years closer in age than she and Jeff. And that simple summation of years rested weightier on her mind than any secret society, no matter how extra special.
Burton would have made a poor poker player. For two weeks he moped about in love with her. He was a wise young man who didn’t hold her slight thickening in the wake of children as an exclusionary fact. Besides, the tallness that caused her to stoop self-consciously when she was fifteen helped her carry a little weight regally twenty years later. Though of course childless Mary Chesnut still enjoyed the figure of a fourteen-year-old.
—Thank you for noticing, Mary said.
When V finally realized how twisted up she had him, she enjoyed playing with Burton for a few weeks. Most of those brushings-by in the narrow hallway were her doing. Some days she laughed and flirted lightly, and others she acted even more dark and brooding than he did.
This was still early enough in the war that Richmond had not yet become flooded with beautiful young widows. By the second year, town whelmed over with them, all wearing flattering black dresses. A precious few were broken beyond repair and would probably die alone in a remote and unimaginable twentieth century still holding tight to their identity as widows of sacred Confederate dead. The rest told themselves—and anyone else willing to listen—that they would devote their lives to the memory of their fallen heroes, while at the same time keeping one eye on the calendar for the earliest date to stop wearing mourning and be colorful again, and the other sharp eye out for new love, the likeliest chance to escape the land of helplessness and sorrow. Many could offer themselves as virtually virgin brides, having married their beaux just days before sending them off to fight and die. Burton eventually found a firecracker of a woman, smart and full of wit, pretty enough, but not too pretty, and V liked to think she had primed the pump and kept him from one of those predacious young widows.
But that was later. Early days of the war, Burton thought he loved V fully and hopelessly. Imagine the romantic pain of loving the wife of the most powerful man in the land. And for three weeks in May she enjoyed convincing Burton to give hope a try. She used any excuse to touch his hand or make a big-sisterly correction to his tie or to smooth his lapels. And
then to tease him for blushing.
So it came as no surprise one day toward the end of the month when he kissed her. She stood in the dining room arranging a vase of flowers when he passed through. The summer slipcovers—bleached cotton duck—had just been fitted over the upholstery, protection against all the sweaty visitors during hot summer. Burton came in the side door. He carried his hat, his hair pressed flat to his head by the band.
V said, Burton, could you come here just a minute?
When he came she leaned in close and with both hands, fingertips against his scalp, fluffed his hair and then shaped it in place.
He stumbled forward and bumped against her, arms circling. He mashed his lips to hers and then backed away and squared up to take a stinging slap that she never delivered. His hat had fallen in the exchange, and it lay on the rug, crown down, an open hole at their feet that they needed to avoid plunging into.
V found it a stirring kiss, a minor key reminder of youthful love. She wanted so much to kiss back. Instead, she said, Burton, let’s have coffee. Sit and compose yourself. I’ll go make it, and then we’ll talk. Do not even think of fleeing. Do not fail to be here when I get back.
He nodded.
She went down to the kitchen, and Ellen was there and saw a look on V’s face.
—What in the world? Ellen said.
—Burton.
—He’s been going around hangdog over you for a month. You didn’t notice?
—He just kissed me, V said.
—That’s different.
—Is there coffee? For two. I’ll take it up.
—If I need to come upstairs, you want me to cough when I get to the top of the stairs?
—Ha, V said.
When she returned, carrying a silver tray of pretty china cups and cream and sugar, Burton looked miserable.
He stood and said, I’m as appalled by my behavior as you are. As soon as the president arrives, I’ll hand in my resignation and confess to what I did.
He said it like a schoolboy reciting a bit of Shakespeare he did not at all understand.
—No, V said. You won’t. And please don’t ever assume you know what appalls me and what doesn’t. At this moment, I’ll claim my share of the blame, which is vastly the bigger slice of cake.