The gardener said, Doesn’t matter what you do, people complain.
One of the younger women eventually said to V, You’re one of the women that has her man locked up in there?
—Yes, V said. A year now.
—Buried under those thick walls?
—He was by himself beneath the casemates for a long time and got sick. But they finally let me take care of him and now we have three rooms of a house.
—Not as bad, then?
—Much better.
An old man with salt-and-pepper hair gone far back at the temples shifted tone and told a story about courting a girl long ago, how he tried to impress her with his horse, which was really not much of a horse to impress a girl with. He said it was a five-gaited gelding—walk, trot, canter, fall down, get back up. But the girl married him anyway. Sadly they never got any children, but happily they lived like newlyweds for forty years, walking on the beach together every evening the weather allowed, except during the worst of the war.
People around the fire said things about how much he must still miss her and how often they remembered her.
After a pause one of the women said to V, You fish much, ma’am?
—Well, I’ve always enjoyed watching it done.
The man with the horse story said, We’ve been trying to be polite, but we know who you are.
—Yes?
—I don’t know how to say it any way but one. We all hope they don’t kill your husband.
—Thank you for that. I hope so too. Down in Savannah the soldiers taught my children to sing a cheerful song about hanging their father.
—They’ll back down, the woman cooking the oysters said. If they wanted him dead they’d never have let him out from under the fort walls. The dirt is so deep over the casemates you can bury a body there. And besides, why make a rival for their own martyred president on purpose?
Everyone sat quietly for a long time. Gray twilight rose from the eastern shore like a morphine daze. And then the horse man said, I bet you have plenty of stories to tell.
—A few, V said.
But all she could remember at the moment related to seafood, a spring when she was twenty or so, the run of shad ascending the Potomac at Washington and men on the shore and out in boats setting seines. Lines of huge cork floats held the top ropes of the seines, and fat lead sinkers dragged the bottom to create a wall of netting. At night, oil lanterns fixed to the cork floats cast yellow light in long bands across the dark river. V told them about riding in an open carriage in the soft spring night, probably feeling all plush from some recent social success and a couple of glasses of wine. She watched the fishermen draw the nets and haul shad in by the thousands. The fish struggled, a roil of packed muscular life, their diamond scales flashing in lantern light.
That recollection did not prove completely satisfying to her audience, so she told the one about her father and the shooting match. She began by saying, Picture a muddle of wealthy ignorant Mississippi gentlemen, drunk and armed with muskets, in a raw patch of new-cleared ground, their horses and slaves shaded at the edge of the woods.
But now the story that seemed tragic when she was younger had become comic, and she successfully played it for laughs.
V sat among the storytellers until the colors of sky and sea balanced themselves alike into a single shade of slate, and she questioned if she were over or under the water, over or under the sky. Only the red coals of the cookfire broke the general blue-gray and fixed a point in space.
The cook spooned more oysters into the hot grease.
V said, Would you have a dozen of those to spare? I know he would like a few.
Moments later, V hurried back through the sally port with a napkin bundle of them, hot and greasy, eight to give to Jeff before they went completely cold and two each for the young guards at the gate who appreciated her treats of candy or pastries and welcomed her comings and goings. She always had something for them, even if only a hard peppermint.
The heavy cannons of the ramparts and the water battery almost disappeared in the dark. The two boys at the gate—young enough to be her sons if she’d had children right after her marriage—ate their oysters in gulps and one of them slightly groaned at the pleasure of it. He raised his fingertips to his face and breathed in the salt sea of the oysters and the earth of bacon grease on his skin.
He reminded V of those thousands of young dying men in the hospitals of Richmond. Northern boys and Southerners, blown apart by war, lying swaddled in bloody bandages, their limbs and the features of their faces blasted away. How difficult on her daily visits not to tell them to go right ahead and die at that very moment of young life while still ruled by a rising tide of emotions, those same emotions old cynical politicians and businessmen and army officers used against them to convince them to fight and die. Hard not to hold their chilly hands with ragged dirty nails and push the long hair back and kiss their sweaty brows and say, Don’t wait, do it now, not decades later when every throb of feeling ebbs, every action and choice becomes tinged with regret and harsh judgment, a sense of waste and loss and emptiness, life narrowing down to little more than an endless railway tunnel. Let go, son. It will be all right. Take one deep breath and then just rise from this bad place and from your broken body and keep going. I’ll sit here with
