All those years together, V thought of Winchester as elderly. Old Winchester. But looking back and doing the sums, he wasn’t much past thirty when she met him. He hadn’t married when he arrived at The Briers and never did.
V couldn’t decide whether her father tried to be kind or cruel when he asked Winchester to escort her upriver to Davis Bend. Maybe WB thought the break would be easier on her if it was clean and quick and final. Or maybe he wanted to send her the message that at seventeen she was old enough to make her own way, that he had cut her loose, shoved her into a world where the contractual nature of marriage was stronger than novels had led her to expect.
Starting right then, and continuing through the rest of his life, she dropped addressing Winchester by any name but Dear Heart.
Right about here, cynics might need reassurance. Male tutors and piano teachers and art instructors hold dim reputations in regard to their behavior toward young female students. Yet as V has said many times over the years—hand to Holy Book—the only touches passing between them all those years, all those thousands of hours alone in the dim silent library and out in the little one-room schoolhouse on the back lawn, were occasional pats on the back of her hand, taps on each temple from his slim forefingers to encourage her to think harder rather than give up when some complex twist of language and thought from Aristotle or Plato or Heraclitus rose like a high gray stone wall between her and the distant brilliant past. Except for that last day at Davis Landing.
DESPITE LIVING ALL HER LIFE with the wide brown flow of the Mississippi as the overwhelming geography of her world—the Pikes Peak and Mont Blanc—V had never traveled on a grand riverboat. So as she and Winchester boarded the Magnolia in Natchez, she was fairly overwhelmed by the scale of the thing. The big stern-wheel vessel—all its grinding and ratchety mechanisms of boilers and cranks and struts and gears and wheels and paddles—pulsed with kinetic power.
V worried about her clothes. Appropriate dress is so easy for men. They mostly want to wear uniforms, so their choices are strict and almost nonexistent. Winchester wore a black suit and a white shirt, and he could have gone to a funeral, a wedding, a baptism, or to testify in a court of law. But V had troubled herself for weeks coming up with a traveling outfit that would place her in the public eye as she wanted to be placed. Slightly more overdressed than underdressed and not looking like a frumpy governess on the way to a first job, but not like a little idiotic curly-haired belle either. She wanted to costume herself for a role that she wasn’t sure existed.
Her compartment felt glamorous, though it was not. The whole space of her cabin measured six by nine with only enough floor space to stand and change clothes. A louvered door opened onto the outside boiler deck, and a solid door opened into the central salon. Her bunk, braced by metal rods, hung like a shelf from the wall. She turned back a wedge of coverlet to reveal perfectly white linen, but when she mashed her hand down, the mattress was only a thin, dense mat of kapok compressed by the weight of a thousand bodies. A tiny wax-blistered bedside shelf served as nightstand, with a single candle to read by. The energy of the big boat pulsed through the floors and walls and felt dangerous—which it was, given the many hundreds of passengers who had died on the river from boiler explosions.
AFTER DINNER—served at long tables in the salon—V and Winchester walked circles around the boiler deck and down the stairs to the main deck and all the way up to the hurricane deck where they stood at the rails and watched a muted early December sunset over Louisiana. A crescent moon and a bright planet or two stood in the deep sky above the horizon. She rested a hand on his forearm as they walked, but they couldn’t find a topic for conversation sustainable beyond three exchanges. When the sky went fully dark, Winchester stopped as they passed her door. He said, We need to say good night.
V said, I thought we might take blankets and sit in the deck chairs and talk until dawn.
—I’m afraid not tonight, Winchester said.
—Then what other night?
—Not this one, dear.
V’S BAGGAGE HUNCHED ON THE DOCK. She stood at the rail of the Magnolia and looked down at them and was already slightly embarrassed that all her clothes and toiletries and books for the journey fit into only two arch top trunks.
After the settled, monied beauty of Natchez—pink azaleas and purple bougainvillea and white columns—Davis Landing looked like bleeding-raw nothing, a vast expanse of brown water merged into a viscous mud landscape churned to slop by horses and oxen and wagon wheels. A stub of gray wood dock reached forty feet into the river. The weathered posts rotted half-a-foot deep into the rings of the cut tops, and deck boards curled upward against their nails at both ends like heathens raising their arms in praise of the
