Varina

by Charles Frazier

Those were times that required choosing a side—and then, sooner or later, history asks, which side were you on?

The first sound of a culture collapsing from its highest steeples starts as a whisper, a sigh.

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

The instant passed so fast, and when that happens,

it goes for good and all you have is a slow lifetime to speculate on revisions. Except time flows one way and drags us with it no matter how hard we paddle upstream.

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 boys went on to describe the fall of Richmond. How everybody in the city, to some degree, seemed blistered from the loss of a long war and the failure of a shaky made-up government created to represent the worst features of a culture.

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.

But by fusing the best of both sides, a kind of intertwining consciousness arises—grandmother and granddaughter wisdom emerging from shared hope, relieved of emotions tainted by control and guilt and anger.

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

So this was Richmond—a veneer of refinement over a deep core of brutality.

Also, Old Point Comfort was where the first Africans

were set ashore from a Dutch ship in 1619.

Don’t wait, do it now, not decades later when every throb of feeling ebbs, every action and choice becomes tinged with regret and harsh judgment,

a sense of waste and loss and emptiness, life narrowing down to little more than an endless railway tunnel.

The Confederacy was not the Roman Empire—just four apocalyptic years.

A blink of the eye with a horrible cost. Walk around Richmond or Lexington or Biloxi and count empty sleeves and pant legs and face masks.

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.