When a Federal officer held a gun on V and asked who that was walking toward the creek in the gray dawn, V said it was her mother. Then after they discovered it was the president and seemed eager to shoot him, V stood between them and said they would have to shoot her first, and the young officer said he’d be happy to oblige. Another soldier said that if there was any resistance, they had orders to fire into the tents with the children and make a bloody massacre of it.
AFTER JEFFERSON SURRENDERED, wild looting. In a frenzy all their baggage was broken open. One trunk had a fat padlock, and a soldier pulled his pistol and fired at it, and the bullet ricocheted off the lock and ripped through his boot and tore his foot apart. Soldiers cut V’s dresses and undergarments into scraps for souvenirs, like knucklebones and hair of saints, and one man showed her his long knife and told her to hold real still as he cut a piece from the hem of the dress she wore. They stole or destroyed most of the children’s clothes except what they had on, and the last few thousand dollars in hard money that V still had from selling their possessions in Richmond disappeared like smoke in the wind. Ellen held Winnie, and Maggie stood crying silently. A soldier had told the stunned boys to climb in the wagon and not come out.
In the confusion, John Wood eased into the trees and took a Federal horse and rode south toward the scent of salt air. From Terra Florida he went to Cuba and then to Nova Scotia, where he lived out his life. Bristol might have escaped similarly, though V never saw him or heard from him again. She still wonders whether he was killed in the attack and left dead in the woods or if he found his way home and shaped a life in the ruins and forgot all about her. She doesn’t even know whether Bristol was his first, middle, or last name.
A YOUNG YANKEE SOLDIER drove the ambulance with V and Ellen and the children in the back, while Burton, Jeff, and Delrey were under guard farther to the front of the wagon train. When they reached Augusta, the Federals paraded Jeff and V through town to a dock at the Savannah River in an open barouche, ancient with the wheels wobbling. The crowds jeered and hooted. A Federal soldier shouted, We’ve got your president.
A hard-shell Rebel yelled back, The devil’s got yours.
In the confusion of loading onto the shabby little river tug, all eyes fixed on the famous prisoners, Delrey slipped away. V saw him pretending to be working—hauling stuff, lifting and setting down, fooling with ropes—until he melted into the crowd, but she believed at the last moment he caught her eye and touched the brim of his hat with two fingers and then pressed his open hand to the center of his chest.
Late that first night on the river, Jimmie Limber waited until all the other children were asleep. He sat close against V and said, I don’t know what’s happening.
—You just rest, Jimmie.
—I can’t sleep. I don’t know what’s going to be of me.
V hugged him tight. Said, Nobody knows that anymore. But remember how you and Delrey said you could keep going one more day and then one more day after that?
—Yes.
—That’s what we’ve got in front of us. I’ll take care of you the best I can tonight and tomorrow and as long as I can.
* * *
V pauses and says, A few weeks ago you asked why I picked you up off the street. Why I took you into the Gray House.
—Yes, but you didn’t really answer.
—Because I didn’t know the answer. But I’ve been thinking and remembering, and I’ve come up with a theory. It involves a story I’ve never told anyone. This happened very early in the war. My father had gone broke again, and I’d arranged a job for him in a government commissary in Alabama, and he died there.
* * *
V floated downstream through Montgomery streets inside a haze of opiates. She wore a startling mourning dress—fine threads of Mexican silver shaping and repeating a wave pattern all down the snug ebony bodice and flowing skirt. The waist, though, cinched not nearly waspish as before the dead child and the living children. Black veiling blurred her face and enlarged her dark eyes.
Her father had died three whole weeks before, so by now he was no longer leaving—he was gone. V hardly thought of him. The word father rested like a distant place-marker in her mind, like finding the cast list for a forgotten play in a bureau drawer, your eye striking the name of the actor in the role of second footman. And despite her lack of feeling toward him, his passing brought on another bout of morphine nearly as strong as after Samuel’s death.
She bobbled traversing the slick cobbles. Red clay oozed between them like margins of recent wounds still weeping. Bubbles of medicine, though, levitated her, lightened her against the day, suds rising in a dirty washtub.
She felt the outside world must see her identical to the self she knew inside, unidentifiable and anonymous, disguised in a dim glow, an amber candle flame seen through seaside mist. Nevertheless, heads turned in recognition of the newish First Lady.
Fame. All it means is, people who don’t know one true thing about you get to have opinions and feel entitled to aim their screeds your way.
The war was still fresh. Some rushed up asking urgent, impossible
