V walked twice around the room trying to think of something to say. She settled in front of one of the giant fireplaces. She could almost walk into it. A fire hardly bigger around than the lid to a stewpot smoked in one corner like an afterthought.
She finally said, Well, this looks like it was built in Queen Elizabeth’s time, to roast a sheep whole.
A woman came out from the kitchen and asked if they would like tea or coffee.
They took their coffee outside in chairs under a big live oak to the side of the house. In a few minutes, Pemberton came carrying a cup of tea and without a word sat down with them, which seemed unusual to V.
V said, I hear you were up in the north woods?
Pemberton said, A long time ago, miss.
Jeff said, Pemberton and I—for a lark—made the first known overland passage from Prairie du Chien to Chicago.
—Mainly to get away from that muddy fort for a while, Pemberton said.
THE THREE OF THEM walked out past the kitchen gardens and the cow barn and horse barn, all scaled smaller than at The Hurricane because Brierfield only encompassed a thousand acres. Jeff and Pemberton explained that they still had plans to clear a couple hundred more acres for cotton someday but didn’t want to lose all the woods.
Pemberton said, This place didn’t get its name for nothing. First time we saw it, this place was a tangle. Plenty of cutting and burning—plenty of brush piles and log piles. Smoke in the air for years.
Jeff said, You remember that day we let the burn pile get out of hand?
Pemberton laughed and said, We nearly burned the world down.
Pemberton pointed nearby—a couple of hundred feet—and told how, as they cleared for the house site, they piled brush and pines and root ends of hardwoods to the size of a biggish cow barn. Said they’d let the pile dry for the months it took to build the house and then doused it with not much coal oil at four points of the compass and struck fire. The pile sizzled for a few minutes trying to find its voice, and then it went up with a great roaring suck of air that lifted the hat off Jeff’s head and spun it high in the sky and then pulled it into the flames that stood taller than the tops of the biggest trees. The hat burned in one quick fizz. Before long, the wind carried the fire into the living woods. The pines caught first and the needles burned fast with a sound like tearing paper and flashed great sparks, and soon the woods were burning down and black smoke rose at a steep pitch toward heaven.
—God or chance, one saved the house, Pemberton said. The wind faced square around and shoved the fire back over black land it had just crossed. It soon burned out to smoke and embers.
He looked at Jeff and said, I’ll never forget the look on your face when your hat flew off.
Jeff laughed and said, Maybe short judgment on both our parts in regard to the wind and closeness of the burn pile to the new house and the woods.
V AND JEFF took a roundabout path back to The Hurricane, often at a gallop, daring each other to jump ditches and fences and downed tree trunks. And then, both of them still flushed and breathing hard from the wild ride, Jeff tried to kiss her in the barn aisle. The light was dim and brown except where high western windows cast angling yellow beams. Dust of hay drifted in the beams and hovered and disappeared into darkness.
The strange light flattered Jeff, made him look dramatic as an actor on a stage. He leaned into her, and she only had to touch his shoulder with a finger to ease him back.
That night V wrote to her mother:
I do not know whether this Jeff Davis is young or old. He looks both at times. But he must be old. I hear he is only two years younger than you are. He seems remarkable, but of uncertain temper. He takes for granted that everybody agrees with him when he expresses an opinion, which offends me. Yet he has a sweet voice and a winning manner of asserting himself. He is the kind of person who would rescue you from a mad dog at any risk, but then insist on stoical indifference to the fright afterward.
Love from Your daughter in exile,
V
What she didn’t describe to her mother was that she found him very handsome in a lean, bony way. And he was bookish—adored words whether on the page or delivered in oratory. Out at Brierfield she had noticed stacks of books on a table by a leather chair. He had told her that what he wanted at sixteen was to study law so that he would have time to write. Told her that in another world he might have had a happy life as a small-town lawyer scribbling poetry and history in his office when he should have been dealing with real estate contracts or petty lawsuits. But when Jeff was fourteen, Joseph began calling upon connections among the wealthy men of the state, and eventually West Point began the arc of Jeff’s destiny. And as he emerged from his long mourning—which in itself
