—Yes it is, Ben said.
V AND BURTON HEADED UPRIVER planning to make a big, leisurely northeast curve with plenty of stops along the way—Memphis and then Cairo and onto the Ohio River and eventually by railway to New York City. Between the Bend and Memphis, they enjoyed a stretch of perfect, warm winter weather—blue days, yellow sunsets, deep crisp nights of air so dry and clear that the bowl of sky filled with stars. V lacked optimism for a future, so one afternoon she suggested to Burton that since they were together on the wide Mississippi—no guarantees such a moment would ever happen again—they should go on and fulfill their promise to each other early. Wine, water, sunset.
Burton, surprised and a little embarrassed, said, I feel a century older than that boy.
—Let’s call it a celebration. We’ve survived to see what happens next, even if it’s grim.
So after an early dinner in the salon—sun setting over the water in colors of gold and silver, brass and iron—V and Burton found chairs on the hurricane deck above the bow. A lone kite glided over—scissoring its forked tail, banking and pitching as it swooped close by the pilothouse. A dense flight of swallows formed shapes against the sky like a child molding a dough ball, never quite creating a convincing box turtle or dog’s head or teapot, but still moving from idea to idea with beautiful fluidity.
V and Burton sat long through the evening with two bottles of fairly good Bordeaux dated before the war, scavenged by the captain from a private stock he’d stored cool below the waterline. They touched glasses in unspoken toasts to avoiding disaster that day and then they dinged spoken toasts to lifelong friendship.
Down toward the bottom of the second bottle—both of them laughing, shawled in blankets—V raised a glass proposing words she wanted Burton to say at her funeral. She said, I’ve been working on it, and I’ll keep refining it over time, but write this down for now—Had I been consulted about the cosmos, I should have criticized its parts with great vigor and complained about the result, in fact I—as at present informed—should have resisted imposing Adam’s society upon Eve as an infliction of boredom not justified by a paternal government.
—Really? Burton said. That’s what you want at your funeral?
—Think of it as a closing argument. At least it will get a laugh from Mary Chesnut.
A couple of weeks later when they parted in New York, V hugged Burton close and then held him out at arm’s length and said, Till death do us part, yes?
EVENTUALLY PRESIDENT JOHNSON’S ATTENTION became distracted by his own impeachment trial, and his urgency to hang Jefferson subsided. V was given permission to visit her husband, who had been moved from his cell to a small aboveground room because the doctors thought he might die from the damp casemates. Then after a great deal of lobbying, she received permission to live at the fort, and she and Jeff were given quarters in a house with a narrow bridge from the top floor over to the ramparts, and they could walk the mile circuit of the fort with wide views of the bay and Hampton Roads. Jefferson’s lawyers began to feel a little hope that the Federals lacked the nerve to try him, fearing they would lose their case and be forced to free a vindicated Jefferson Davis on the world.
EASED FROM DREADING THE WORST by having it mostly happen, V tried out the idea that she was still theoretically youngish in body and mind. She started going out to the beach at Old Point Comfort at dawn and swimming with the young wife of an officer. When they made it a distance offshore and turned to start back, the huge black cannon barrels of the water battery loomed like a cresting wave. Sometimes when she wanted to swim or to walk beyond the walls and the shopkeeper General Miles tried to stop her, she’d remind him that she was not his prisoner. He agreed he couldn’t legally make her stay inside the walls but suggested that if she needed total freedom she might find rooms with the whores in Norfolk, since she already knew a couple of them intimately. Otherwise, she should remember he had the power to have her stripped to the skin and searched again for any reason—including his own amusement—every time she came and went.
—The newspapers will love that story, she said.
LATE AFTERNOONS she walked down the sand past shiny black devil’s purses, beached jellyfish, sandpipers dashing at the waterline, black-headed gulls standing solemn as deacons, and brown pelicans skimming the water to fill their pouches with little fish. Before sunset, the sky domed soft and blue or flat and gray, and ospreys hovered high, bracing still as hummingbirds against the sea breeze and then plunging, wings tucked, into the water for menhaden and spot. She watched the ospreys so often and so long she realized they usually shifted the fish in their talons to carry them headfirst as they flew away. Always the hiss of low bay waves on sand and the shells of horseshoe crabs like empty helmets.
One particular sunset, a few folks from the town gathered on the beach to fry oysters dredged in cornmeal in a big iron skillet of bacon grease over a beach fire. Men shucked the oysters and threw the shells into a pile, and a woman patted the oysters into a trencher of cornmeal and slipped them into the grease. A few older people sat on three-legged stools and the rest on old patchwork quilts spread over the sand.
They invited V to sit and then continued their conversation. One man told how strong his garden had come in and how sad it was to watch the unpicked excess tomatoes fall from the vine.
A woman said, And yet you never give
