Varina

by Charles Frazier

And heaps of guilt too, for failing to find a bloodless way to end ownership of people—choosing a bloodbath instead. Since then, South and North have been busy constructing new memories and new histories, fictions fighting to become facts.

—If you haven’t noticed, she says, we’re a furious nation, and war drums beat in our chest. Our leaders proclaim better than they negotiate.

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.

Your Miss Botume’s fabricating my statements and using quotation marks to cover her tracks. Slapping memory and supposition together decades after the fact.

and conjure their version of history constructed from the weightless tools of words and uncertain memory.

she felt too shabby to be there and vowed to stop pretending, to accept that lives rarely have plots, but sometimes they find shape.

V worries the girl will die in her arms, and she doesn’t need another gone child.

—Except, last week I thought I heard someone scream. —Words fail, V says. To live is to rant.

Children don’t judge their own lives. Normal for them is what’s laid before them day by day. Judgment comes later.

That age, you make choices and don’t always know you’re making them. Some don’t matter, but a surprisingly large lot of them haunt forever. Each choice shuts off whole worlds that might have been.

The moment forces decision. Wait, and risk choices disappearing forever. Make up your addled young mind too soon and afterward—unless you are a true and total rebel—your way forward in life narrows down to the dimensions of a railroad tunnel.

Whether you pick well or poorly, the act of choosing carries grief. Leaves you wondering, years later, what life might have been had you chosen differently.

Many years later, now that choices matter less, V has finally learned that sitting calm within herself and waiting is often the best choice. And even when it’s not, those around you become uncomfortable because they think you are wise.

So even very young she saw slavery as an ancient practice arising because rich people would rather not do hard work, and also from the tendency of people to clench hard to advantageous passages in the Bible and dismiss the rest.

He shrugged off the title of general with the ease of a man who expects life to be unpredictable and defines himself anew almost daily.

You’ll find that as you grow old, you stop bothering to hide the self you’ve been all along.

He was a businessman and a politician who believed the Constitution protected the capital of his class and culture above everything else.

great loss wasn’t that simple. You couldn’t just wish yourself out of it. You had to go through it all the way, had to let grief roll over you like Mississippi River floodwater until it decided to let you rise to the surface and keep going, more beaten and broken than before.

When the time is remote enough nobody amounts to much.