James wonders if the preacher doing the talking is named Minnigerode. He remembers a story—V called it a moment in time, a cupped handful of the million clock ticks she never fully understood. A soft morning in May, early in the war. The tall windows of the Gray House open wide and the sheer curtains ghosting in the slight breeze. Jeff, all solemn, knelt on a cushion. And Minnigerode, the Episcopal rector of the most important church in town, sprinkled him in baptism, no more water than the tap of a damp blossom against his brow. Jeff had suddenly become religious after years of indifference as to whether he’d been baptized as an infant or not. At the end of the ceremony, the divine Minnigerode said, I look upon you as God’s chosen instrument.
James wonders if that endorsement more than fulfilled all Jeff wanted out of the ceremony, given that the most powerful and political families in town went to St. Paul’s every Sunday. Or maybe all the Bible Jeff and the preacher needed was the one passage from Luke, the slave beaten with many stripes.
Maybe even that early in the war Jeff knew he was betting everything on a losing idea. And all it was was an idea—airy, theoretical, abstract—backed up by human souls equally airy. But somewhere down below all the thinking, the digging into the entrails of the Holy Constitution for prophecy and justification, very real human bodies suffered the pain of theory gone bad.
AFTER THE SERVICE ENDS and most people leave, James walks down the hill to the graves. V doesn’t have her own marker, just a plaque on the side of Jeff’s monument. Maggie, the only surviving Davis, chose a dreadful compliant-wife passage from the Bible to be V’s last testament. James starts to write it in his notebook but stops after three words because it doesn’t apply to the person he’s known.
He wonders how it is possible to love someone and still want to throw down every remnant of the order they lived by. He thinks, I don’t want to be a mirror too perfect in imaging flaws—gratitude and resentment, that’s what I have.
NEXT MORNING ON THE TRAIN NORTH, James reads a newspaper claiming that V’s last words to Maggie were, Don’t you wear black. It is bad for your health, and will depress your husband. But what he wants to remember and writes in his notebook is something she said to him one Sunday:
When the time is remote enough nobody amounts to much.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to express my appreciation and thanks to Katherine Frazier, Kyle Crandell, and Annie Crandell for their patience, advice, support, and daily effort to maintain a clear space for me to work. Annie Crandell provided more kinds of astute and meticulous assistance, insight, and advice than I have room to enumerate. Also, my thanks to Betty Frazier and Dora Beal, both avid readers, for their encouragement over the years.
I wish to thank K. B. Carle for her insightful reading and perceptive comments.
My gratitude to Amanda Urban and Dan Halpern and everyone at Ecco.
Thanks to Kit Swaggert for many years of friendship and support and for the mandala of this book’s world, drawn from the lid of Varina’s inkpot. And to Chan Gordon for finding Varina’s pen and inkpot and James Blake’s blue book.
Varina is a novel. For those interested in the history behind the fiction, I would point first toward the following:
Cashin, Joan E. First Lady of the Confederacy: Varina Davis’s Civil War. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2006.
Cooper, William J., Jr. Jefferson Davis, American. New York: Vintage, 2001.
Ross, Ishbel. First Lady of the South: The Life of Mrs. Jefferson Davis. New York: Harper, 1958.
Strode, Hudson. Jefferson Davis, Private Letters. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966.
Woodward, C. Vann. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.
About the Author
CHARLES FRAZIER is the author of Cold Mountain, an international bestseller that won the National Book Award and was adapted into an Academy Award–winning film by Anthony Minghella. Frazier is also the author of the bestselling novels Thirteen Moons and Nightwoods.
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Also by Charles Frazier
Nightwoods
Thirteen Moons
Cold Mountain
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
VARINA. Copyright © 2018 by 3 Crows Corporation. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover photograph: James River, Virginia © Denis Tangney Jr/Getty Images
Digital Edition APRIL 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-240600-2
Version 03052018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-240598-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-06-283438-6 (international edition)
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ISBN 978-0-06-285615-9 (B&N exclusive signed edition)
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