Varina

by Charles Frazier

WHAT LIES BEHIND US AND WHAT LIES BEFORE US ARE TINY MATTERS COMPARED TO WHAT LIES WITHIN US. ~ EMERSON.

A mile farther down the road she thought, You can mire yourself in the past, but you can’t change a damn thing in that lost world.

All V finds indisputable is the last bit of the passage: Jefferson Davis was captured at Irwinville, Georgia, May 10, 1865. He had with him his family, his Postmaster General Reagan, his Private Secretary Harrison.

After the war, Jeff wrote it in a letter, I have compounded with my pride for the material interest of my family, and am ready to go on to the end as may best promote their happiness. He’s of course trying to blame me and the children for his fall. Guilt and pride nearly burnt our marriage down to the foundation.

But I got distracted from what I wanted to say to Jeff about compounding with his pride. I wrote back and told him that bad choices lead to bad consequences, like discussing misbehavior with a child. But he never accepted being wrong and never apologized for taking down our family. Or eleven states full of families. He and his older brother Joseph were alike in that. A shared trait. Never apologize for anything. Plow ahead always believing you’re in the right.

RICHMOND NEVER RESEMBLED HOME.

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.

The first sound of a culture collapsing from its highest steeples starts as a whisper, a sigh. The rattle of windows in their frames.

SAYS, A hundred thousand tragedies played out in the spring of 1865. We’d bet everything on anger and angry ideas, and we lost.

Bad, angry decisions left behind a huge cost in life and suffering for the entire nation. And utter loss of wealth for the South.

Nights when she was young, looking down from the lawn of The Briers, steamboats passed below her lit up like Christmas.

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.

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.

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

Humans are inhuman, whether it’s by direct action or by acceptance of a horrible action as normal.

Lunch arrives. Mrs. Scott talks while she eats, and the cavity of her mouth as she works her food makes sounds like a rubber plunger opening a sink drain. Chicken salad and lettuce at various stages of liquidation make repeat appearances between lips and teeth.

How grandparents and grandchildren so often get along very well. Remove one generation—twenty-five years at least—and the anger in both directions dissipates. All the failed expectations and betrayals become cleansed by an intervention of time. Resentment and bitter need for retribution fall away. Love becomes the operative emotion.

The idea was, the you you are with others is not you. To be lonesome is to be who you most fully are. And also maybe something about the great reluctance with which we let go of our belief in a just God.

A deep belief that your moment in time is the pinnacle, the only standard of judgment extending from the creation of light until the black apocalypse, that what you believe right now is eternal truth because you believe it so fervently—those deep beliefs so crucial at the moment but none of them more permanent than a puff of air across a palmful of dry talcum.

V thought drowsily how no one knows the inside of a marriage except the two people impounded together.

What those miserable political animals are doing to that beautiful man—a man, let me be clear, I have wanted to kill many times for my own reasons—is disgusting and heartbreaking.

don’t even know whether past feelings and memories deserve any respect at all. Maybe they’re no more important than a pinch of pain from an injury decades old. Feelings and memories rise and pass every day, like the weather. Only important at the moment. Why not just notice them and let them go?

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.

Also, Old Point Comfort was where the first Africans were set ashore from a Dutch ship in 1619. History loves irony, V thought.

She had wanted to own a house there. Nothing elaborate—a place where little sandy feet and smears of jam sandwiches on the furniture would be welcome.

But they never built the house. Events got in the way. Now, all the children she planned to build it for had died or grown up.

She talked awhile, developing an argument that they—she and Jeff and the culture at large—had made bad choices one by one, spaced out over time so that they felt individual.

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.

When they grew sleepy and began aiming toward bed, V said, I wonder what people talk about who’ve destroyed their lives with addictions other than books and politics and money and war?

Jeffy—last of the boys—died of yellow fever in Memphis. He was twenty-one and had been the least Davis of her children—never responsible enough to suit his father, prone to impulsiveness, easily bored.

She and Jeff had gotten word he was sick, and yet neither of them went up to see him and to take care of him. She still can’t explain why.

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

He was never a rebel. He was a businessman and a politician who believed the Constitution protected the capital of his class and culture above everything else.

He very much looked forward to a trial, the chance to argue his case.

—You said capital? —Yes. The most cold-blooded view is that the war was a violent argument over the forms it could take.

She packed her leaving trunks and walked away from another houseful of furniture and moved to New York City, mainly because she could not afford London or Paris.

IT’S TRUE—that thing she said about biographies all ending the same.

Then a personal declaration—I am not one of those whose righteousness makes their prayer available.

And then at the end of the war—My name is a heritage of woe.

He remembers saying to V, Someday you’ll be forgiven for all this, yes? —No, she said.

When the time is remote enough nobody amounts to much.