THE HOUSE IN ABBEVILLE stood in the Y where Main Street divides. A large, pretty house, its two-acre wedge of land filled with green lawn and foundation azaleas blooming scarlet and purple and white. The fugitives arrived an hour after dark, tired and dingy and hungry. Smelling like campfire and worse. The house rose before them like a white monument from a lost world. It belonged to Armistead Burt, and he didn’t worry about Federal retaliation for offering hospitality to old friends on the run.
V held Winnie, who had taken a fever for half a day but seemed to be getting better. Jimmie had only one little pox welt under his chin. He and the other children peered out from the ambulance bed with aspects like the force of a great explosion had recently passed over them. Burton, his eyes dead in his face, sat hunched and braced with both hands on the pommel, his elbows locked to hold the weight of his torso.
V said, You’re tingling from fatigue like the rest of us.
—No, Burton said. I’m fine. He sat up straight.
—Just claim it, V said. I know you’ll ride till you fall out of the saddle, but at this point, denying is nothing but young-man pride.
—All right. I could use supper and a washcloth and a basin of warm water and a ten-hour nap.
Yellow lamplight behind the muntins and stiles of the windows projected geometric figures onto the dark lawn. The front door burst open and Mary Chesnut came flowing out. She hollered in her thin little-woman voice, Where the hell have you fools been? I’d have called for the home guard to go find you, except they’ve all run off to surrender and sign the loyalty oath. We wondered if the rounders and outliers had swarmed you. Good Lord, come here to me. We haven’t hugged in months. We’ve got food and wine and hot water and clean beds. The men and children can all fall out when they want, but you can’t sleep until at least one in the morning because I’ve so many questions that need answers. The Burts aren’t due back for a few days. They went to see if their house in Columbia burned along with most of the town—and mine too. They left me in charge, since they’re running the house like a refuge hotel until we all get home or get arrested or make a clean getaway.
—I’m so tired, V said.
—You never said that when we were nineteen in Washington City, Mary Chesnut said.
—I’ll do my best, V said, rallying. In fact, I’ll set my goal to put you to bed with a kiss on the forehead when the sun comes up, like I’ve done so many times before.
—You all clean up and we’ll eat and then we’ll put the weak ones to bed and meet in the parlor, she said. I’ll have wine and suchlike.
EARLY ON WHEN SHE AND MARY MET in Washington—both teens married to congressmen, living and dining in Brown’s Hotel and calling it their mess—they were famous enemies for the first month. Too much alike and neither used to sharing the attention that came with being young and smart and pretty. Every evening the sound of their crossfire over the dinner table was only partially muffled by laughter. Each of them made a dramatic public show of tolerating the other. Then they had a cup of tea—just the two of them, no audience—and it took about ten minutes to make peace, and before long they began getting together in their rooms before parties to comment on how their dresses hung.
Back then Mary’s housemaid, Phoebe, said to V, Missus Mary won’t ever get no babies.
—Why? V said.
—Too narrow across the hips.
Phoebe held her hands up, faced her palms about eight inches apart. Which was a slight exaggeration. But whether for that reason or some other, over the years of Mary’s marriage, Phoebe’s prophecy proved true. As far as V knew, Mary had never been even briefly pregnant, much less carried a child to term.
V too went long years without producing a child, but the reason was no mystery to her. Then for a few years she had babies one right after the other. So, she was different because of children, beaten up by having them and loving them and losing them.
Mary, though, had retained that frail girl shape, still looked slightly like a child who had raided her mother’s closet to try on her best dress. If you looked hard, Mary’s face had slightly broadened, maybe. Wrinkles no deeper than the light crescent press of a fingernail mark against the skin around her mouth and eyes. Under the powder, her color grayed some, but the backs of her hands remained smooth as a teen’s. She still knew so much, having time every day to read as many books and periodicals as she wanted, and to sit around in parlors chatting with witty smart people keeping her on her toes. So to some degree Mary remained nineteen forever—bright and promising, her body intact and her mind free from the permanent grief of seeing your group of babies begin to dwindle away, leaving your wit hard to retrieve and permanently darkened.
MARY TOOK OUT a plump wax paper packet and tore off the corner and tapped a pinch into her red wine and gave it a swirl.
She said, It’s so nice not to have to make excuses. Would you care for some?
—All the rest, please, V said. She reached out her glass.
Mary ripped the packet wide open and shook until the last grains fell, and then she poured them both a splash more wine.
—That will give you some relief, she said. Though I had an accident with it a while back. I sent Phoebe to the doctor to pick up my supplies, and he told her to mix the
