precise moment she knew that it had happened, that it was happening. Only that after her daddy’s jubilee, every day her nightmares thickened, and her sleep thinned, and she woke one morning to find her mouth filling up with a volley of saliva like a flood so acrid and awful that she spat it out in her bare hands. Outside a cock crowed the morning into being and she, frantic, disentangled her legs from the covers that stuck to her like fetters, and there in the dipping valley in her mattress, between her legs, was a spot of red followed after by a darker, browner line, the whole stain fine and thin as a scripted point of exclamation. Her body heaved. She was sick onto herself and she called, high and shrill, for the housegirl Sarah, who did not come for long horrid minutes in which she shivered in the wet of her own vomit. Her body had betrayed her.
* * *
—
“You still bleedin’, Miss?” Sarah had asked.
Varina sighed, sunk deeper. The water in the tub scalded at her shoulders. She bade her house girl to make it hotter and hotter still. It was not enough.
“No. The bleedin’s stopped.”
“It’s like that for me too sometimes.” The mulatta had dipped her voice low, sharing a secret as if she thought it was something Varina needed. “Like it don’t want to get started. But it always comes.”
Varina knew it wasn’t going to come, not for her. This was not the start of her monthly courses. This was an end. Varina kept her expression steady, though inside she rocked with shame, with horror. Was that the moment she’d known? She had wished for more blood, known it wasn’t enough somehow. Knew that it meant one way or the other that something was wrong. She was wrong. She’d skipped something important in her life. Gone from child to woman, violently.
“Ain’t the water too hot, Miss?” Sarah warned.
In the tub Varina let her body slip down and down. Slowly. Inch by boiling inch, then she let her face sink down too and watched the strange quivering way her curls floated up above her, stretched in their effort to stay at the surface. She watched bubbles flutter from her nose and mouth. They called to her dimming mind a memory of the moths she’d chased through the yard sometime in those endless dragging days of her youth. She’d never caught a single one, had she?
Sarah yanked her upward by the arms so forcefully that half the water gushed out to splatter on the wood floor. Varina drew in air in desperate clumps and the mulatta hissed at her and Varina watched Sarah’s big pretty brown eyes go wide with panic as their two hearts pounded, and then go wider still when she realized she was still gripping onto a white woman’s arms with enough desperation to bruise. She let go.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“I don’t know,” Varina had said. But she did know.
They both seemed to recall themselves in the same moment. Varina wicked the wet from her eyes. Sarah began to clean the puddles on the floor. When she was done, she stood and stared down at Varina, which was a thing she should have known better than to do, and Varina would have told her so. Would have scolded her and screamed. But Varina couldn’t draw the breath.
“Can I help you outta there now, Miss Varina?” Sarah spoke like she was bargaining with a stubborn child.
“No,” Varina said, the one word harsh and terrible. She couldn’t bear the thought of being touched again.
* * *
—
Her daddy took to wearing that old dusty uniform, relic of another war, marched around the house planning a one-man campaign against the Yankees, saying how the youngbloods nowadays didn’t know how to fight, had no pride in the things they were fighting for, and that was why they were losing. He’d told her of the offer of marriage as an afterthought, not even looking at her. Not even seeing.
Varina hadn’t cared. Not about her daddy’s hurt that he was too old to fight at the front line. Not about pride,