Writing of that kind was work, a job. You did it, and a check eventually came, and the rent got paid. That money and a scant income from a couple of inherited farming properties she leased out were her living. Census of 1900, when the man came knocking on her door asking questions, she gave her occupation as Writer and Landlord. In 1880, when Jeff answered the same question for her, he said, Keeps House.
Other pieces of writing, though, she would have done gratis. One such piece of free advice went to a friend whose daughter was about to jump into marriage with a wealthy older widower. The girl’s name was Belle, and V had known her since childhood. In a letter to the mother, V spilled her heart—writing:
I am not pleased with the widower prospect. It is offering a burnt out vessel to a fresh young girl like Belle. This suitor steps up long after a successful love he had identified as his eternal soul life, and then she was removed by death. I gave the best & all of my life to a girdled tree, it was live oak and good for any purpose except for blossom & fruit, and I am not willing for Belle to be content with anything less than the whole of a man’s heart.
V would have offered her thoughts on the dedication of Grant’s Tomb for free as well, but the World insisted on paying her, and she was in no position to turn down a check. She attended the ceremony at the invitation of her friend Julia, Grant’s widow. The papers—north and south—found the friendship between V and Julia odd and exciting, and wrote about it as if the two women ought to have nothing in common when, in fact, they had a great deal. V and Julia took regular carriage rides in Central Park, and lunched at prominent restaurants. They wanted to be seen together, wanted their friendship to be noted and commented on in the papers, even if they both faced criticism by hard-shelled Confederates and Federals for it. They wanted to show that reconciliation was possible. For several summers before Julia’s death, she and V spent vacations together—adjacent cottages at modest Adirondack lodges. So many evenings sitting in uncomfortable wooden chairs watching the sun set behind lakes and mountains, talking about everything except that horrible war.
—Write about that, V says to James. I’m rather proud of Julia and myself for our friendship.
—So if I decide to write a book, I have your blessing? James says. Your help?
—No. Let’s keep calling it visiting and talking. Come again next Sunday. Then write what you want. Or not. Doesn’t matter to me. For so long I thought everything I cared about was lost, never to be returned. Seeing one of my boys still in the world is plenty for me. Seeing you going and doing.
—The visits mean a lot to me too, and I want them to continue. But if I jotted notes now and then . . . ?
—No. Let’s not get professional. Unreliable memory is all we have. You ask, and I’ll try to answer the best I can remember, and then you patch my forty-year-old memories onto your photographic flashes and the blue book.
—All right, then. Your wedding and after?
* * *
Knoxie’s death had been a deep and slowly killing wound and had weakened their marriage from the start. Her ghost haunted even their wedding. They’d had a big ceremony planned at Davis Bend, but that got canceled last-minute for reasons V has never discussed. They didn’t much communicate for a while, and then all of a sudden the wedding was back on, at The Briers this time, with no Davis other than Jeff attending. Oddly, on the boat down to Natchez before the improvised wedding, Jeff ran into Knoxie’s father, General Zachary Taylor—eventually to become President Taylor—for the first time since the elopement long ago. What a sweet moment for their reconciliation. About that same time Eliza thought it useful to write V a letter describing how Jeff had been going through an old trunk and found a pair of Knoxie’s slippers and fainted from excess emotion. Then, after the wedding, on the way downriver to New Orleans for their honeymoon, Jeff insisted on stopping to visit Knoxie’s grave.
That’s when V should have realized that she could not miraculously heal a girdled tree—bark cut and peeled away past the living flesh in a wide belt around the trunk. The sap stops flowing, and you starve the tree to death. But it takes a long time. On a tree you cut the belt down into the white. On a person you’d cut into to the red.
AS TO THE SIMPLE, rushed wedding at The Briers, V judged it elaborate enough for a farmer’s wife. Since it happened spur-of-the-moment, she didn’t wear a gown. She pulled an almost-white dress—Indian muslin—out of her wardrobe and on her way out into the yard for the vows, she picked a pink rose from the garden to wear in her hair because she had been doing that since she was a child. The rush to marry, of course, caused speculation at the time and down through the years. But that sort of curiosity V has never cared to satisfy.
SHE THOUGHT SHE HAD MARRIED an idiosyncratic widower with a raw plantation on the Mississippi between Natchez and Vicksburg. She expected they would
