—He told me you were still over there, sick, Sara said. Or maybe just sick of the South and of him and wanting to live anywhere but here. He is poison up north. You know that. Couldn’t get a job blacking boots without wearing a disguise.
—Not long after the war, V said, he declined an offer to be president of a college high on a mountaintop in Tennessee, gave itself the grand name University of the South, like Virginia and North Carolina hadn’t already had colleges for nearly a century. It didn’t seem like enough money, but thinking about it now, I can imagine living up on a green mountain in a pretty white president’s house, rebuilding a life.
Sara said, In Virginia, at the college where Lee presided, they made a shrine of his horse’s grave, so imagine what they’re doing now that Lee himself has passed.
—Constructing a three-quarter-scale replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza?
—Even Stonewall’s amputated arm has its own gravestone. And yet Jeff shows up here looking like a scarecrow if you snatched all the straw out and draped the weathered suit over a cross of old gray tomato stakes. He looks out at the world like an archer peeping above a parapet to see what new enemy lays siege now.
V sat and stared into the dark woods, the gray moss swagging from the trees, the flat black water.
She said, I understand there are snakes down here nine feet long, indigo colored with the undersides of their necks yellow.
—You don’t often see them that long, Sara said. Six feet or seven mostly. They’re beautiful in the sun, and they run from you and hide in the bushes and eat rattlesnakes for breakfast.
—I worry a great deal about his book, V said. He was good at writing speeches. Bursts of opinion and belief and knowledge shaped to entertain a crowd for an hour. A book is different. Longer, but not just longer. In a speech, you say something foolish, you can deny it later. Fog in the wind. You can claim faulty remembrance on the part of audience and press, then recast your thoughts in a better direction. If you happen to say something brilliant, all you have to do is keep saying it, and it sticks. But a book binds you to it forever, every damn word, from the moment of publication. All those permanent black marks on paper. You think you own it, but over time it owns you.
—He’s doing fine, Sara said. Learning as he goes. And since I’ve written a few books, I try to help.
—Yes, I keep intending to read one of yours. But as for Jeff, so far I’ve always been the one helping him write.
—He enjoys help, doesn’t he? He was a man of action when he was younger, so now I try to encourage him in the day-by-day sitting still at a table draining memory dry to fill blank pages with strong words. The lore of the job. The necessity of taking small pleasures where they come—the acidic smell of the inkpot, the texture of paper passing under the nib, cool wet air in the afternoon when a thunderstorm passes. And we haven’t even gotten to the joy of revising yet, which unlike life allows you to go back and rethink and make yourself better than you really are. I’m trying to help him see his days at the desk as honorable work, forward motion, effort toward some effect other than wandering two continents blind and aimless. Even if the work comes to nothing, he will have these days to shape the past, make sense of how the runes fell against him.
V laughed and said, You make it sound like chance, roll of the dice. But that’s not the case.
She talked awhile, developing an argument that they—she and Jeff and the culture at large—had made bad choices one by one, spaced out over time so that they felt individual. But actually they accumulated. Choices of convenience and conviction, choices coincident with the people they lived among, following the general culture and the overriding matter of economics, money and its distribution, fair or not. Never acknowledging that the general culture is often stupid or evil and would vote out God in favor of the devil if he fed them back their hate and fear in a way that made them feel righteous. After years of loss and reflection, your old deluded decisions click together like the works of a watch packed tight within its case—many tiny, turning, interlocking wheels, each one bristling sharp-toothed with machine-cut gears. The force of every decision transferring gear to gear, wheel to wheel, each one motivating a larger energy going in no direction but steep downward to darkness at an increasing pitch. And then one morning the world resembles the wake of Noah’s flood, stretching unrecognizable to the horizon, and you wonder how you got there. One thing for sure, it wasn’t from a bad throw of dice or runes or an unfavorable turn of cards. Not luck or chance. Blame falls hard and can’t be dodged by the guilty.
V AND SARA STOOD and gathered themselves.
Sara said, We don’t have to be enemies.
V leaned into Sara and kissed both her cheeks and said, Thank you so much for coming.
She performed it like saying good night at the front door after one of her famous soirées in Washington long ago. Frogs croaked nearby, and in the distance, the mighty belch of a bull alligator.
—Let’s walk back together, Sara said.
—Shall we? V asked. Why not? With the moon rising so big and bright.
They climbed the steps to the gallery arm in arm. Jeff rose to meet them, a thin pale presence, his face and hands exactly the color of moonlight and his
