“Did you hear me, Rue? I said I’m to be married at last.”
They caught eyes in the glass, neither one of them looking glad. It seemed to Rue that they were waiting, watching for the drama of these two people to play out before them. Who were these strange, tired little women they’d turned into? They’d lost the children they’d been—now they were grown and picking bits of war-flung ash out of their hair. The mirror told of the years, but there were things the mirror couldn’t tell. The time-flattened scars from a tree branch on Rue’s back, the price of a friendship she couldn’t let go—and for Varina, were there marks from the minstrel show six months back? Hurts of the kind that left no earthly scar, showed no reflection?
They never spoke on it, that awful night. It was meant to have been Varina’s coming out, but instead Rue felt she’d collapsed in on herself. Like a promised harvest that never came, Varina had wilted before she’d ever come to bloom.
The misery that had lately plagued Varina had little to do with her brothers turned to soldiers, brother against brother at war, or a world made suddenly bereft of men, eligible husbands slim for the picking. It seemed to Rue that there was a corruption now growing in Varina that had never quite been there before. Just because you couldn’t see it or hold it or heal it didn’t mean it didn’t exist. The Rue of the mirror eased her face into passable excitement and said, “I heard you, Miss Varina, and I am happy for you.”
“Do you want to see him?” Varina pulled herself and her hair out of Rue’s grasp, pawed through her belongings. Ribbons and pins and nets and combs tumbled from in front of the mirror, and in it Rue watched herself watching Varina, watched herself trying to stay small and out of her mistress’s way, lest she become just another bit of clutter to be knocked to the floor and trampled on.
“Here it is.”
It was a little nothing bit of tin that Varina could hold in her two hands, and at the insistence of her fingernails it peeled open like a storybook might. It revealed no stories, only the one little picture: a man, his uniform, his gun.
“Henry is his name.”
Henry peered up at Rue, and Rue had to push back on that self-saving instinct to look away from the probing eyes of a white man, real or no. He was young and thin-lipped, and someone had rosed up his cheeks in the image like they thought it would give him life. It hadn’t done anything but made him look sterner. Beneath the dark shadow of his heavy brow and the flat brim of his soldier’s hat, his colorless eyes seemed like empty places where something had been left out.
“Handsome Henry,” Varina sung out. She wasn’t even looking at his hard-tin face. She was instead waiting on Rue’s expression like it held some soothsaying, reading for tea leaves in her squinting eyes and wrinkled brow.
“Handsome,” Rue agreed.
Varina shut the tintype like it was a sprung trap.
* * *
—
Sarah and Rue were summoned to the parlor. Just them two. Led there by Ma Doe, who would tell them nothing of what they were about to hear.
All that week they had been in preparations, flushing the house of every single sign of mourning, searching out every inch of black and removing it in preparation for Miss Varina to receive her suitor, who, visiting temporarily from the somber northern battle lines, would not want to come to his future wife’s home and find death clinging there also.
“Sit,” Ma Doe told them. Neither of them moved. They’d never been asked to sit in a white person’s living room a single moment of their lives. Their knees wouldn’t bend that way.
Ma Doe said, “He’s in a gracious mood so you best keep him that way and do as he say.”
Ma Doe left and the both of them sat on the very edge of two wooden chairs like they thought