Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  “Percival,” Paloma whispers.

  When he opens his eyes, there’s a brief look of vagueness and disorientation, like someone surfacing from a depth. Taking Addie in, he doesn’t smile, but there is something kind, relaxed, and deep in Percival’s expression that puts her at her ease. It reminds her of the look that Jarry gave her from the docks and emanates from the same agated, dark hazel eyes. Searching for her husband’s likeness in his father, Addie finds instead his other son.

  “‘He said that, gathering leeches, far and wide,’” he says, pressing the physician’s arm,

  “‘He traveled, stirring thus about his feet

  The waters of the pool where they abide….’

  “Do you recognize the poet?”

  “I would have to venture Wordsworth,” she replies.

  “And you would be correct. And you, I think, are Adelaide, our bride. You have met Paloma. Do you know Dr. Sims?”

  “How do you do.”

  “Congratulations,” Sims replies. “I wish you every happiness. Percival, I’ll leave you now. Paloma, may I have a word?”

  As the two withdraw, Percival indicates the chair. “Sit down, my dear, and let us have a visit. They say your outbound journey was more stimulating than you might have wished.”

  “For my aunt’s sake, yes,” she answers, sitting. “For my part, I found it curiously exalting.”

  “Did you?” Addie reads approval like a subtle index in his eyes; warmed thereby, she warms reciprocally toward him. “If this is distasteful”—he indicates his chest—“I can cover them.”

  “No. They must be painful, though.”

  “Surprisingly, no. In fact, after the small ache of the bite, I find they have an anesthetic quality. I much prefer them to the lancet and the bleeding bowl. Tell me, though, do you find Wando Passo to your liking?”

  “It’s…extraordinary.”

  Percival’s expression sobers, as though some equivocation has crept into her tone. “Our customs, I expect, are strange to you.”

  “No, I…”

  His glance follows hers to the table with the candles and the crucifix. “You may ask, if you’re curious.”

  “Is it a shrine?”

  “Of sorts. It’s called a bóveda. They’re found in many Cuban homes.”

  “It is Catholic?”

  “Some Catholics have them, but they got them from their Negroes. The African, you see, venerates his ancestors in much the way the Cuban nobleman and the white aristocrat of Charleston do.”

  Addie smiles.

  Percival’s failure to return it makes clear that he does not intend this as a drollery. “The difference,” he goes on, “is that we worship them as the departed, as something dead and gone. To them, though, the dead, the muertos or nfumbi, are no farther off than those people outside in the garden. Listen.” He holds a finger up. “Hear the drone of conversation? Sometimes, lying here, I fancy I can hear the dead like that. And if I’m very quiet, very still, I begin to pick out actual words. And there are windows and doors, Addie, by which they can reenter the living world again and show themselves and speak. A bóveda is such a place, and that is what this is to me, a place where I can offer thanks and ask them for their help and they can answer me…. But I’ve often thought there are few things more tedious than unsolicited accounts of others’ spiritual convictions, which one does not share oneself.” And now, for the first time, he smiles.

  “How do they speak, though?” Addie asks, ignoring his disclaimer, not bored in the least.

  “In ways you’d recognize, ways you’ve experienced a thousand times. In dreams. Through what we call ‘intuition.’ A sudden flash of brilliant understanding, an insoluble problem suddenly solved. When chills run along your spine.”

  “How curious, look,” she says, showing him the gooseflesh on her arm. “Just as you spoke…”

  “Yes, niña, that is they. That means they are close. And there are other ways, Addie, secret ways of which I cannot speak, except to say that they are more direct and awful, in the old sense of that word.”

  And the strange thing is that it does not seem strange at all to Addie to have fallen so swiftly into this conversation with Harlan’s father, a conversation not quite like any she’s had before. “But how did you find your way into such things?”

  “Ah, well,” says Percival, and as he gazes toward the window, a look of melancholy settles on his face. It’s the expression, Addie thinks, of a man at the end of a long journey, staring back over the wide plain he’s crossed, knowing he won’t retrace his steps. “In Cuba, when I was young—about your age—I went through a period of trouble. A crucial piece of my invention eluded me, and then my young wife, Melissa, Harlan’s mother, took suddenly ill. Hoping to cure her, I exhausted every available medical recourse, and then, when nothing worked, I sought…different help. That’s how I came to know Paloma. I failed to save Melissa, but my efforts led me through a door into a world that’s all but unknown here. The experience changed me.”

  “How?” she asks.

  “If you’re curious, we’ll speak of it another time. For now, let it suffice to say, I heard what are called the drums of affliction. I didn’t understand that it was them, the muertos, persecuting me.”

  “Why were they persecuting you?”

  “For the same reason they persecute us all: to make us change our life.”

  Without prelude or apparent reason, Addie starts to weep, and it is less weeping than a single sob that, once got out, is gone. When she looks at Percival, his eyes have gone studious and deep. It’s Jarry’s look again, the look of one who knows some crucial truth concerning you that you have not yet learned or not yet found the strength to tell yourself.

  “I’ve upset you,” he says, touching her hand.

  “But you did change?”

  “Ah, well, Addie, there’s the rub. I changed to some degree. But what I encountered there required still deeper changes that I failed to make. That failure has touched everybody here.” He briefly holds her stare, then something draws his attention to the window. Turning, Addie sees Clarisse, her black dress sharp against the white sand road. She’s carrying the plate, and what strikes Addie in the moment is that Clarisse is walking not toward the river, but away from it, and not to sunlight, as her mother asked, but westward toward the forest, where she presently disappears into the shadows of the trees.

  When she turns back, Percival is studying her. “But I hadn’t meant to be so heavy. If I forget myself, it’s because your face is too good to deceive. I’ll kiss you. May I kiss you then?”

  She smiles. “You may.” As she leans to him, Addie catches a whiff of age like soured milk, not quite hidden by the clove he chews. To her surprise, she feels her hair stir with intaken breath, as the old man smells her, too.

  “Now let us speak about more cheerful things…. You’ve brought a book, I see. They’ve told me you are literary.”

  “‘They’?” She smiles. “I expect ‘they’ did not intend it as a compliment.”

  “Well, dear girl, this is South Carolina, after all, where reading for pleasure, much less for instruction, is on a social par with spreading the wet leprosy.”

  She laughs gratefully at this. “Yes, in Charleston, they say I drove away my beaux with poetry. The young men there regard me as a sort of Hester Prynne, only in lieu of a scarlet letter, I wear a scarlet number on my breast.”

  “What number might that be?”

  She touches the spot. “At the moment, it is thirty-three.”

  He smiles. “Well, if it’s any consolation, from where I sit—or lie—you seem barely whelped to me. And look around you at these heavy shelves. You see where I have come to die, like an old man returning to the nursery, surrounded by the broken toys of youth.”

  “Not broken, though, surely?” Addie says. “Tell me one does not outgrow one’s books.”

  “Sadly, yes, for me. In my youth, I was a reader. I searched through all these volumes, seeking one t
hat could tell me the one thing I wished to know.”

  “And what was that?”

  “How to live—what other question is there?”

  “And you were disappointed?”

  “I never found an answer, and eventually reading came to seem another drug, more benign, but not so different finally from laudanum or alcohol, a distraction from the very thing I sought to do: namely, living. And if the great ones—even Wordsworth, even Shakespeare—couldn’t tell me how to live, to whom shall I turn now to teach me how to die? That is the lesson I’ve gone to school to now. Its rigor is so preoccupying and severe that, in comparison, the thought of opening a book seems puny.”

  Addie, for whom reading has been a kind of personal religion, unquestioned and unquestionable, doesn’t quite know how to take this. “Well, I hope when my time comes, I have the courage to face it as a lesson, too.”

  “I’m sure you shall. Never fear, my dear.”

  “Aren’t you…?”

  “Afraid? Of course. Aren’t you afraid of what will happen when you and Harlan go upstairs tonight? Of course you are, yet go you will. You know you must. An irresistible power compels you, and the same draws me. I’m afraid and drawn in just that way.”

  “Death is different, though, isn’t it? What I fear is the thought that I may cease.”

  “Ah, then we are different there,” he says. “That, I don’t fear in the least. I’m certain there is further life. My sole concern is what that life may be. But enough of this! Enough of me! What volume have you brought?” She hands it to him, and he holds it at arm’s length. “Byron! Madam! Is this fit matter for one newly entered into the married state?”

  “What, must I give him up?” she answers brightly. “I’ve loved him so well, though. I don’t know if I could.”

  “Well, then, here’s someone we can ask,” he says as the doors swing open. “Give us your opinion, Jarry. Is Byron proper reading for a bride?”

  “I can’t see, offhand,” the steward answers, with a suggestion of embarrassment, “why he shouldn’t be. Unless marriage is the death of love—in which case, yes.”

  “I agree!” cries Addie. “I’ve always thought of him in just that way—as the poet of true love.”

  “Well, let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” laughs Percival. “You both, though, are at an age for him. But, let me see, I knew some verses once….

  ‘From the wreck of the past, which hath perish’d,

  Thus much I at least may recall,

  It hath taught me that what I most cherish’d

  Deserved to be dearest of all….’”

  “I’m not familiar with the poem,” she says.

  “We’ll have to see if we can find it for you. If you admire him, it’s one that you should know. And the sentiment? Do you agree that what we most cherish deserves to be dearest of all?”

  “It seems inarguable.”

  “I wish it seemed inarguable to me!” And now, like an old fire that has struck a hidden vein of sap and flared unnaturally, he seems to gutter and sink back upon himself.

  “I was thinking of some lines of his today,” Addie says, to fill the silence. “‘Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle / Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime?’ How very like South Carolina they seem, and in fact the very landscape we passed through on the boat.”

  “‘The Bride of Abydos,’ is it not?” says Percival.

  She confirms it with a smile.

  “And how does it continue?”

  “‘Where the rage of the vulture, the song of the turtle…’I can’t remember now.”

  “‘Now melt into sorrow,’” Jarry offers, “‘now madden to crime.’”

  She smiles at him. “You know the poem….”

  “There’s a verse in it that I admire.”

  “May we hear it?”

  “Perhaps another time.”

  “Come, now,” says Percival. “Don’t play coy. Do you mean to mystify us?”

  “Father…”

  “He thinks, because he is a Negro,” Percival says to Addie, “that I take undue pride in his erudition and put him on unfair display, but what he fails to understand is that if Harlan knew a line of verse, I’d be no less quick to show him off. And it is not for me, Jarry, after all, it is to reveal yourself, the temper of your mind, to one who may turn out to be a friend. Come, then, in a trusting spirit, give it us. ‘’Tis vain—my tongue cannot impart…’ Will you help?”

  Jarry stands in conflict, flushing over the request in a way that both elicits Addie’s sympathy and makes her curious to see how he’ll respond, who he will prove to be. And in this fraction of a second, she thinks of young freedmen she’s passed in Charleston on the street, black men soberly dressed, their collars starched, their ties correct and rich. These men—and, on occasion, women, too—have met her eyes and held her stare, not defiantly, the way some servants will, but with intelligent and friendly curiosity, like her own toward them, and perhaps a trace of irony as though to ward off a judgment experience has taught them to expect in a white woman’s eyes. Addie has rarely said more than “Good morning” to such persons, but she’s watched them disappear around a corner into their own lives and wondered what those lives consisted of, certain only that they were not delimited by the borders of a cotton field, or the clay embankment circling a square of rice.

  “‘’Tis vain—my tongue cannot impart,’” Percival prompts once more, “‘My almost…’”

  “‘…drunkenness of heart…’” Now Jarry picks it up.

  “‘When first this liberated eye

  Survey’d Earth, Ocean, Sun, and Sky,

  As if my spirit pierced them through,

  And all their inmost wonders knew;

  One word alone can paint to thee

  That more than feeling…’”

  Now there’s a slight hitch in his voice. He turns to the window. And Addie, whose face is bright, who is sitting forward in her chair, thinks, Yes? Yes?

  “‘I was free.’”

  The answer, when it comes, hits her like a soft blow to the chest.

  And it is Percival now who looks at Addie, who gazes deep into her eyes, curious to see how she’ll respond, who she will prove to be.

  “How beautifully you recite,” she says.

  “And that surprises you?” Jarry asks.

  Addie smiles and holds his stare. “It does not surprise me in the least.”

  “Nor me.”

  They all turn, and there is Harlan frowning in the door. “We’ve yet to cut the cake, and already you’ve started your campaign to turn my wife against me. How should I be surprised?”

  “No, dear, it’s not like that,” says Addie, rushing to his side.

  “Not at all, my boy,” says Percival. “We’re just reciting poetry. Don’t let it provoke you.”

  “But I’m not, Father,” he answers, coming in. “I’m not angry in the least. In fact, I’m grateful to you, for this conversation is one we need to have, and Addie should be part of it. It concerns her just as closely now as it does everybody here.” He turns to Jarry. “Our entire spring order is jetsam washing up along a fifty-mile-long stretch of South Carolina beach. I’ve been called to serve my country, and here at Wando Passo there are four hundred of your people who need new clothes, who have no shoes or stockings, no candles, no salt for their food or animals, and the only thing you can think of is pursuing your own selfish pleasure.”

  “That is not—”

  “No, excuse me,” Harlan cuts him off. “Let me tell you a little story about ‘freedom,’ Jarry. I heard it just today.” Harlan reaches into his coat for a cigar. “Jules Poinsett told a group of us. A week or two ago, this old Negro, Pompey, showed up at the Poinsetts’ gate. Jules had no idea who the fellow was. One old woman in the quarters remembered him. It turns out Jules’s grandfather—not his father, his grandfather, old Mr. Sam—freed this Pompey at his death. For forty years,” he says, lighting up, �
�he’s worked…as a free smith…in Charleston. Do you know why he came back?” Harlan poses his question to the room triumphantly, waving out his match. “I’ll tell you why. To ask—no, not to ask, to beg—his old marse’s grandson to reenslave him. And do you know why Pompey wanted that? In order to acquire his badge so he can pass the roads and ply his trade without being harassed by the constabulary. This is happening everywhere. That’s what it’s come to for your free brethren in Charleston, Jarry. The town is an armed camp. Assuming we did let you go, that’s what awaits you there.”

  “I don’t intend to go to Charleston.”

  “No? Then where do you intend to go? You cannot emigrate. There are eleven Federal ships now riding off the Charleston bar. Unless you mean to hold your breath and swim to Africa, I’m at a loss to understand what you intend to do.”

  “I am sure there will be difficulties,” Jarry answers. “There are difficulties now. Every morning I awake to a fresh crop and deal with them the best I can, as they arise. I’m confident I’ll deal with those that freedom brings in the same way. The difference is…”

  “Yes?” says Harlan. “Give it us.”

  “The difficulties here and now are yours and undertaken for your sake; then and there, they will be mine.”

  “Yes, yes, that’s well and good,” says Harlan mincingly. “That answer sounds quite fine, but it doesn’t deal with the reality of what awaits you. You’re like a child. You see this flame called freedom. It’s beautiful and bright, and you say ooh and ahh. Those who are wiser, who have experience of it, tell you it will burn, but you know better. You will put your hand into the fire no matter what they say, but I’m here to tell you, Jarry, it will burn you, it will hurt.”