Varina

by Charles Frazier

The 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.

THE SARATOGA RAILWAY STATION PULSES WITH RACE-DAY foot traffic, the energy of hope funneling people out the doors and toward the track.

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.

Amen.

Their friend Robert Toombs, until recently a U.S. senator from Washington, Georgia, sent Jeff a letter of warning against being pulled into battle. Toombs wrote, It is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet’s nest which extends from mountain to ocean, and legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary; it puts us in the wrong; it is fatal.

Especially since I found the blue book, I’ve come to see Mr. Davis and his beliefs this way. He did as most politicians do—except more so—corrupt our language and symbols of freedom, pervert our heroes. Because, like so many of them, he held no beloved idea or philosophy as tightly as his money purse. Take a king or a president or anybody. Put a heavy sack of gold in one hand and a feather-light declaration about freedom in the other. And then an outlaw sticks a pistol in his face and says give me one or the other. Every time—ten out of ten—he’ll hug the sack and throw away the ideals. Because the sack’s what’s behind the ideals, like the foundation under a building. And that’s how freedom and chains and a whipping post can live alongside each other comfortably.

Never acknowledging that the general culture is often stupid or evil and would vote out God in favor of the devil if he fed them back their hate and fear in a way that made them feel righteous.