Varina

by Charles Frazier

BEING ON THE WRONG SIDE of history carries consequences. V lives that truth every day. If you’ve done terrible things, lived a terrible way, profited from pain in the face of history’s power to judge, then guilt and loss accrue. Redemption becomes an abstract idea receding before you. Even if your sin—like dirt farmers in Sherman’s path—had been simply to live in the wrong place, you suffered. Didn’t matter whether you owned slaves or which way you voted or how good your intentions had been. Or how bad. You might suffer as much as the family of a great plantation, which was maybe not completely just. But if you were the family with a great plantation, you had it coming. Those were times that required choosing a side—and then, sooner or later, history asks, which side were you on?

Fame. All it means is, people who don’t know one true thing about you get to have opinions and feel entitled to aim their screeds your way.

Question arises, though, do you have a place in the world?

Then an incisive question—Is it self-government or self-immolation that we are testing?

Then he jots a thought about V. Her last years, she was in many ways a very modern woman—unanchored and unmoored, unconstrained by family, poverty, friends, or love of place. Making a major portion of her living from her own work and talent. So why such sense of crisis in her life near its end? Yearning for a reconciliation with the past—the country’s and her own. Her need to shape memory into history.

He remembers a story—V called it a moment in time, a cupped handful of the million clock ticks she never fully understood.

Jeff, all solemn, knelt on a cushion. And Minnigerode, the Episcopal rector of the most important church in town, sprinkled him in baptism, no more water than the tap of a damp blossom against his brow. Jeff had suddenly become religious after years of indifference as to whether he’d been baptized as an infant or not. At the end of the ceremony, the divine Minnigerode said, I look upon you as God’s chosen instrument. James wonders if that endorsement more than fulfilled all Jeff wanted out of the ceremony, given that the most powerful and political families in town went to St. Paul’s every Sunday. Or maybe all the Bible Jeff and the preacher needed was the one passage from Luke, the slave beaten with many stripes.

Maybe even that early in the war Jeff knew he was betting everything on a losing idea. And all it was was an idea—airy, theoretical, abstract—backed up by human souls equally airy. But somewhere down below all the thinking, the digging into the entrails of the Holy Constitution for prophecy and justification, very real human bodies suffered the pain of theory gone bad.