A great many black men hefted large heavy things on and off the boat.
Winchester already waited on the dock alongside the trunks. Seeing him from the deck, V thought he looked like a preacher standing at the pulpit ready to begin a ceremony.
She walked down the lowered stage to the dock and stood close beside him. She said, Who gives this girl?
Winchester shook his head and smiled a grim smile. He looked tired.
A slim black man—V’s age, wearing creased brown pants and a very white shirt—walked onto the dock and said, Miss Howell?
—Yes?
—I’ll take you to Hurricane, miss. Be a while getting there, with the road and all.
—Just a few moments, V said.
AS THE UNLOADING AND RELOADING of the boat finished, she and Winchester stood together and looked away from the river into the country. The only visible structure stood at the tree line, a big shed roofed with old silvery shakes. It leaned off plumb, shadowed by tall pines. A sloppy wet one-track road stretched inland and disappeared in a curve between the woods and the shed and a fallow cotton field.
V said, I thought you were spending a night or two here and then taking a down boat?
—No, Winchester said. That’s not possible.
—Of course it’s possible. In fact I understood it was planned.
—Not possible for me. I’m sorry. I’ll go on up to Vicksburg and find a boat back down to Natchez in a few days.
Winchester awkwardly kissed her hand. And then he reached his arms around her and held her in a long embrace like a man gripping his own life, trying to keep from being pulled below the opaque surface of the river and dragged to the Gulf by the weight of high muddy water. And then he gripped her shoulders at their bony points and pushed her out to arm’s length and looked her level in the eyes. She and Winchester had become the same height a year before.
V looked back at him. She noticed a few threads of gray hairs at his temples.
Winchester said, Don’t.
He shook his head, as if he had more to say, but he didn’t finish. He kissed her on the forehead and on each cheek and then on the lips. And then he turned and walked up the stage to the boat.
V watched him until he was gone. Wondering, don’t what?
Don’t forget to write? Don’t stop reading Homer? Don’t ever forget me? Don’t leave me? 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.
Looking back, how much older was Winchester than the older man she married?
THE SLIM BLACK MAN SAT in a flatbed wagon waiting—not a carriage but a wagon you might haul hay in. He was handsome and wore a pointed goatee that lengthened his face. His eyes were pale green and distant, a veil between himself and the world. V climbed in and sat on the bench beside the driver while her trunks were loaded. The Magnolia’s big paddle wheel began churning against the current.
The horses stood sunken in mud to the pasterns, and when the driver slapped the reins they took their first steps with loud sounds of suction.
When they reached the woods-edge, V said, This is strange territory.
All the warning the man could give was to turn his head her way and look her a glancing blow and say, Deep in the world round here, miss.
—Tell me your name, she said.
—Benjamin Montgomery.
They rolled past cotton fields and cornfields, ragged and brutalized, the rubble of stems and stalks and branches, all the biologic rot of the off-season. For a while, the driver hummed a weary delta pattern of notes, five of them, over and over.
V said, Benjamin, is it a nice house, The Hurricane?
—Better than most.
—I’ve met Mr. Joseph Davis before, back when I was a girl. But not his wife and children.
—All young ladies around the place, ma’am—about your same age.
—Really? And Mrs. Davis?
—The same too.
—Mysterious, V said.
—Ma’am?
—Mother and daughters all the same age. Unusual at least.
—They call each other all by their first names without saying Mama and Daddy and Sister.
—Yes? Like none of them are related?
Benjamin shrugged his shoulders.
THEN THE FLURRY OF ARRIVAL, the greetings, all the strangeness of somebody else’s house. The smells of people and food. All the figuring out of your bedroom, your baggage, the delicacy of how they handle chamber pots. Except that chamber pots didn’t factor because, amazingly, each of the three floors had a toilet flushed with rainwater from a cistern down in the basement and a tank on the roof.
A strange table that evening—Old Joseph and his gathering of four young women, five counting V. They dined by the dim light of big silver candelabras with half the tapers burned down to useless stubs. Supper was perfunctory, almost a snack. Slices of cold salty ham, a white bowl of boiled potatoes, a small bowl of yesterday’s greens, a cruet of cider vinegar, a straw basket of biscuits, and a small clump of butter slumping on a saucer.
Eliza, the young wife, said, You’ve come a day before I expected, so tomorrow night will be better. She cracked a smile to reveal tiny white teeth set in very pink gums.
—This is the third of the month, isn’t it? V said, confused and ready to apologize for her presence.
—Oh, I wouldn’t know, the wife said. I just expected you a day later than this one is all.
As Benjamin had said, Joseph’s wife and his eldest daughter and V all looked much the same age. The two other daughters looked to be about thirteen, and both seemed like strange girls exiled to that lonely river bend without strong memories of anywhere else.
A servant poured alcohol
