AFTER FIFTEEN DAYS OF REST and rich New Orleans food, Burton looked less gaunt and ghostly. They caught a steamboat upriver, stopping in Natchez with plans to stay awhile. But once settled into a modest hotel V realized no one she wanted to see in her hometown remained. She didn’t want to go out to the graveyard and ponder Winchester’s marker—he wasn’t there. He was in her heart and her head every day. At The Briers she enjoyed the river view, but there was nothing else for her. So she and Burton rested and read for a few days, and then moved on toward Davis Bend to discover whether anything of value had been left after the Federal sacking.
In letters to friends posted during their journey, V settled on a formula to describe Burton, calling him all in the world to me. Why not? He had sacrificed so much for V and Jeff, and his loyalty had cost him his youth.
THE BIG MANSION AT THE HURRICANE wasn’t even a picturesque ruin of a plantation house. V walked the perimeter and found heaps of rubble, foundation bricks, a few burned stubs of great columns. The hole of the basement opened to the sky, and she looked down onto massive crazed timbers and dunes of gray ashes. She thought she saw a long, curved metal handle that might have worked the pump to raise water three stories high to flush Old Joe’s amazing toilets.
Joseph was pathetic, diminished, ruined. He lived in a bedroom of the guesthouse and would have seemed pitiful to any humanitarian who hadn’t suffered under his personality since seventeen as V had. She gave him a nice robe she had bought in New Orleans, and the old bastard looked so low and broken that she added four hundred dollars cash to the gift—money she didn’t really have to spare. Men often age pathetic that way, even the meanest of them. Old toothless lions that once bit your hand off begin wanting a pat on the head.
Joseph wasn’t even the owner anymore. He had sold Davis Bend—The Hurricane and Brierfield both—to Benjamin Montgomery, the man who’d picked V up at the dock on her first visit. Payments of $18,000 a year, a portion of which would go to Jeff. All V could think was that she hadn’t been allowed to communicate much more to her husband than that she and the children missed him and loved him, but Jeff and Joseph had managed to negotiate the sale of an enormous ruined plantation to their former slaves.
AT DINNER THAT FIRST NIGHT, Joseph sat at one end of the table and Ben sat at the other. Ben still wore his goatee, now threaded with white, and his green eyes still gave nothing away, his face a perfect mask.
Ben’s two daughters—very excited—told V all about going to Oberlin College the next year, asking for her advice on the classes they should take, their wardrobes. They treated Joseph like a beloved hoary grandfather and kept asking if he needed anything, kept checking to see if he was eating enough. More biscuits, Mr. Davis? Another spoonful of brown gravy on your potatoes? You’re getting too skinny—eat another piece of cake. The girls were nearly the age V was when she first fell off the boat from Natchez naive as could be.
Strange as it seemed, it all made sense. Essentially, Benjamin had been running the whole place for years—keeping the books, writing most of the correspondence, managing Brierfield too after Pemberton died—so it wasn’t a great stretch in terms of logic for him to become owner. It was a great stretch when it came to history, though.
End of the evening, Benjamin said to V, I hope this new arrangement isn’t distressing to you.
—No, it isn’t. Do you remember the first time we met?
—Yes, but I didn’t expect you would.
—That day, riding in from the river, could either of us have imagined tonight?
—I could have. Or something like it.
V AND BURTON RODE OUT to Brierfield very sedately in a two-wheeled gig. As soon as they came in sight of the house, Burton pulled back the horse. Across the horizontal white boards of the front gable, someone had swiped big red words with a paintbrush—THE HOUSE THAT JEFF BUILT. They’d been warned that the place was intact but had been looted to emptiness by Federal troops before being used as a school by the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. But V had to see for herself.
They sat and looked, and then Burton said, Do you have memories? Does this make you sad?
—I never want to see a picturesque plantation house again.
On the way back to The Hurricane, she told Burton how Benjamin had invented an effective shallow-water propeller for riverboats and had tried to patent it before the war, but the Federal government denied his claim because as a slave he was not legally a citizen of the United States. So Joseph and Jeff tried to patent it for him in their names, but that didn’t work because, obviously, they hadn’t invented the device, since the patent office already had Ben’s drawings and descriptions and whatever else a patent application required. She’d asked Ben about it after dinner, and he said that immediately following the war when he and all the other freed people had become citizens, he applied again to the federal patent office, and again the answer was nope—without even a reason given.
FOR OLD TIMES’ SAKE, maybe, Ben drove V and Burton to the dock himself. Before they boarded he said to V, My son, Isaiah, and I want to make a place for free black people here on Davis Bend. A community. Come back and see how we’re doing sometime.
—If I ever pass this way again I certainly will. And please ask your girls to write and tell me about their college adventures.
V paused and
