by David Payne
“Do you remember, Daddy?”
“No, sweetheart, I don’t.”
“Will you die, Daddy?”
He hesitated. “Someday, sweetie. Hopefully, not for a long time.”
“I don’t want you to.”
He turned and looked at her small face on the pillow. “I don’t want to go. But by then I expect you’ll be a grown woman as old as Mommy and Daddy are now with children of your own. You don’t need to worry about this, okay? I’ll stay as long as I can.”
“You promise?”
“I promise,” Ransom said, and his voice was suddenly husky.
“Daddy?”
“What?”
“I know a joke.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Knock, knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Orange.”
“Orange, who?”
“Orange you glad to see me?”
Ran laughed foolishly at this.
“Daddy?”
“What?”
And just that quickly, she was gone. As he reached across and turned the lamp off, he remembered Abner Gant coming up at his father’s funeral. “He never missed a day of work,” he said, and that was it, the one ray of light that escaped the black hole of Mel’s life. Lying there, Ran suddenly wondered what his little girl would say of him. What would Charlie? Claire?
Downstairs, she laughed a laugh he hadn’t heard in longer than he cared to think about, and Ran thought about the time she’d come to Killdeer right before the wedding. Mel, dying then and drinking harder than ever, asked her if she wanted one—like the leper in Papillon offering his cigar to Steve McQueen—and Claire DeLay from Charleston, in her sleeveless linen dress, with her yellow cashmere sweater tied around her neck, said, “Sure, why not?” and tossed back a shot of Chateau Shotgun Shack, said, “Ahhh,” and wiped her hand across her mouth. Mel’s eyes moistened like an old hound’s when its master walks into the room, slain by the same thing that slew his son. Mel opened up and told her about the farm where he grew up, about suckering and tobacco worms and riding a canvas drag of primed leaves to the barn behind Commander, his daddy’s mule, and Ransom, who had never heard these stories, never heard his father speak twenty consecutive words, listened from the kitchen, amazed, and finally hurt. He went out on the kitchen steps to smoke and stared at the old Thunderbird, still up on blocks, and when Mel fell asleep, Claire found him there.
“So,” he said, “I guess you’re going to tell me he’s not that bad after all.”
“No, he’s pretty bad.”
“So now you know.”
“Now I know.”
“It’s not too late to call it off.”
Claire laughed and Ransom studied her with his sad, soulful stare and understood she thought he was joking.
He’d always wanted to give his old man the kind of compassion Claire showed that afternoon, but the best Ran had been able to come up with was to write a check to have the Thunderbird restored. When he pulled it to the curb, the whole block had turned out to look, and Ran was nursing fantasies of Mel like a kid with a new bike, kicking the tires, dying to take her for a spin. Instead, his father walked around the car without a word, picked a fleck of paste wax the detailer had missed off the Continental spare, stared at it on his fingertip, then turned that haunted stare on Ran, not only without gratitude, but with more resentment than before. It took him a long time to understand that Mel, by then, was past the point of wanting the car fixed, if indeed he ever had, and that its brokenness was part, perhaps the most part, of what he loved, and Ran had taken that away. So Mel died, and the sort of simple interchange Claire had with him that day never passed between him and his son.
Remembering this, Ran realized that in the same way he’d forgotten or lost touch with his True Self, he’d also forgotten Claire’s, who she’d been that day without even trying. I think you make it awful hard on Claire—Cell’s words came back, and Ransom, with a heavy pang of ownership, realized it was true. And as he lay beside his sleeping daughter in her narrow bed, it came home to him, not as a thought, but as a stabbing pang in his left side, that what Claire and Cell had told him, the other thing, was also true: I am a racist, he thought. Somewhere, in some deep corner of himself, never fully challenged or expunged, he was, and having loved Shanté first, and maybe even best, did not exonerate him.
Yet it seemed to Ran that he could take this on as well, that along with all the rest, he could find a way to be a friend to Cell again as well as the father Hope and Charlie needed and the husband Claire deserved. Maybe it was not too late to be that other, better man he’d always believed he could be and had never actually been. And in the process, maybe he could write that hit song, too. As he lay there, Ransom’s heart was full, and he realized this was the answer to Claire’s question, the one she’d asked last night, Why are you here?
And he wanted to tell her this; it seemed important to do it now and not to wait. The first step was to come clean about his meds. He was on the landing, starting down, when he caught sight of them in the gilded foyer mirror. Claire and Cell were in the library. He was seated at the partners desk, reading from a book. Claire stood behind him, and as Ransom watched, she raised her hand and rested it lightly on his shoulder, just lightly, familiarly lifted it and left it there. There was nothing untoward in the gesture, yet Ransom tried to swallow and suddenly could not. And at that moment, the laundry hamper, the one from her story, caught his eye. For some reason, his glance was drawn to it like iron filings to a magnet. The wicker creel was full, and in the top of it were Claire’s hot pink underpants, the bold new lingerie upgrade he’d assumed was meant for him. The floor began to desolidify beneath his feet, and when Claire laughed again, it was a laugh he didn’t know, from some place so old and deep he’d never been admitted there at all, and when Cell looked up at her and smiled, it was no longer Cell, and the woman who smiled back, whose hair shone blond in the deceiving portrait lights, was no longer Ransom’s wife.
TWENTY-TWO
Addie runs and stumbles, stumbles, runs. Her hem is drenched. Her hair is all about her face. What has Harlan done? She speaks the thought aloud. “What has Harlan done to me?” She’s sobbing now; her hands are at her mouth. She shakes her head, and then her eyes are dry, and he’s as absent from her thoughts as he was three months ago before she even knew his name. It’s a long time before she thinks about the path. By the time she looks, it’s lost. The path is lost, and so is Addie, irretrievably, and dark is falling fast.
She comes into a clearing, into different air. It’s warmer here—there’s a little rise of ground—but suddenly she feels cold. There’s gooseflesh on her arms. Rubbing up and down, she has a sudden flash of Percival—“That means they are close, niña”—but quickly shoves it down. A faint, wet quashing accompanies Addie as she goes, a sound she takes for her wet shoes. There’s a blackened circle from some old fire and the fallen carcass of a tree—is it a cypress?—so large that four people holding hands might encompass it, but only just. Insects and rot have mined a cavity in the trunk, and as the slant rays of the setting sun fall into the black cave, something glitters on the floor, winking amber, green, and blue. Peering cautiously in—her hand is on her breast now, her finger at the button—she sees bits of broken bottle glass, unfamiliar coins, and what look like horehound candies, the little ones in paper twists her aunt throws by the handful every Christmas morning to the eager children in the yard. On the floor of the cave is a design in chalk and streaks and smears of some orange substance like the fat that rises in a pot of cooling soup. There are candles and brimming goblets, as there were on Percival’s bóveda, but there are other things as well, things she did not see there—a rusty knife, a cigar, half smoked, a bottle of dark rum—and Paloma’s plate, the good bone-china one she held when Addie first caught sight of her in urgent conference with Clarisse. The leeches are still there—still, there—arranged in the pattern of an X. Each has been penetrated, one by
a nail, another by an animal’s curved, sharpened bone, a third by a needle and thread; they loom like soft islands in the lake of Percival’s black blood, which leaks its smell into the air, a smell like rotting meat and copper, along with something thick and sickly sweet like roses. On the margin of this lake, a single blowsy fly sits, rubbing its hands. The feeling here is not like Percival’s bóveda in the least.
And now her eye is drawn to the deep interior, to something hulking near the rear wall of the cave. It looks, briefly, almost like a human form, but as her eyes adjust, she realizes she’s staring at a cloth, a black cloth draped on something underneath. From its upper edge, a branch protrudes, a mottled green and white, like sycamore. On it is a single twig, and on that twig a single, shriveled leaf. Lower, she sees the ribbed tip of an ivory horn, and at the level of the floor, a metal foot, animal in shape—like some large jungle cat, a jaguar or a leopard—and the round black belly of what appears to be an iron pot…one might say a cauldron.
Fear is raging like a wildfire through her senses, but Addie tells herself it’s just some Negro thing, something put here by the slaves, some superstition, like the broom at weddings…. But then she gazes into a depression in the wood as deep as her cupped hands and sees her own face staring back—not a reflection. Harlan’s is there, too. It’s the miniature she commissioned of the two of them, in tempera on ivory, and gave as an engagement gift. It’s been submerged in water, and the rusty knife has been stabbed into the hinge, cleaving them apart. Clarisse, she thinks, Clarisse did this, and she feels something stealing over her like madness. In some part of herself, she half wonders if this is a dream but knows it’s not. And it’s only now that Addie notices that the sound she heard before is coming from within the cave, behind the cloth, and the curious thing is, she isn’t moving now. Addie’s standing still, dead still, listening with every fiber, and the sound seems less like footsteps on a muddy path than something eating, like Sultan, Harlan’s bloodhound, off in the corner of the pen, gnawing his wet bone. And as the hound, sensing an intruder, might stop and look up from its paws, so this thing now, inside the pot, senses her and stops. She can feel its alien awareness fixed on her, and it is dour, old, and strong, unspeakably. A taste she can’t identify, a bad taste, fills her mouth, and suddenly she’s sweating, not perspiring, sweating rivers. The whole forest has grown still. No wind blows. No bird sings. There’s only the drowsy buzzing of the fly on the plate rim. As she looks down at her arm, a mosquito lights, and Addie, thinking she should swat it, merely watches as it does its business and flies off into the gloom with a thin whine. Standing here, she has the sudden visceral conviction that the life around her, all the green life of the swamp and of the world itself, including hers, is like a thin skim floating on a deep black pond, and the pond is death. And death is old and fathomlessly deep and life is new and tenuous and thin, and anything—a tossed stone, a breath of wind—could rouse those still black waters, and life, beneath that wave of blood, would cease.
This is evil. The voice speaks in Addie’s mind, and she becomes aware there’s something watching her. It’s in the tree above her head. For a moment, Addie can’t tell what it is. It’s like nothing she’s ever seen, but then it moves, its feathers give off oily gleams, and Addie sees it is a large black crow. It turns its head, regarding her severely from its polished obsidian eye; then, with an angry caw, it spreads its wings and flies off, croaking, through the trees.
Addie starts to run again. The last light leaves. She runs and runs until she can’t run anymore and then falls, panting, to her knees. She lies, facedown, where she falls, her cheek against the ground. Somehow this position eases her. She’s afraid to move, afraid that motion might reawaken her distress. Her heartbeat lifts her up and down, a little less each time. She falls asleep and dreams she’s arguing with Harlan. It’s a bitter fight. “What have you done to me?”
Her own cry awakens her, and she sits bolt upright, thinking of Clarisse, her manner on the porch. What is between them—this is crystal clear to Addie now—is something old, not new. And the others—Paloma, Jarry, Percival—they all know. Of course they do. “Stanzas to Augusta,” Jarry’s look—this is what it meant. When she stepped off the gangway onto shore, he knew what she was stepping into. The Negro brother pitied her, but Harlan, the good white son, smiled and let her come. And why? Why, she thinks, did Harlan marry me? Addie cannot answer it. All she knows is that no human being, no enemy, has given her as hard and cruel a blow as her new husband, who vowed to love and honor her, who was supposed to cherish her and hold her dear. In the moment, Addie doesn’t know if she can bear up under it and live.
Night has fallen now. The old moon, like a hard mint that has been sucked thin, is setting over the trees, where cicadas chirr their long, uninterrupted note, and mole crickets, their broken, intermittent ones. Addie is wet and starts to shiver. The April night is cold, and cold becomes an agony she can barely stand. And yet she does stand it, and gradually the shivering stops, and she no longer feels the cold, feels almost warm, in fact. Something in her—not the self she mostly knows—something she remembers, though not from where, makes peace with the cold on her behalf. And now here, in the dark, trilling forest, as the old moon sinks, the voice begins to speak again, more clearly. It doesn’t say, You’ve been betrayed. It doesn’t answer why or what it means. It says, You married without love. And unlike yesterday, when the voice seemed an imposition, a sparrow to be shooed out of the house, now, as Addie’s thoughts slow down, as anger cools, she listens and replies. You’re right. She says the words aloud. “You’re right, I did.” And then the next phrase in the conversation comes. “I’m lost. I have forgotten how to live.” Addie thought she came to Wando Passo for a new life to begin, but now it seems that something brought her here for her old life to end. She starts to cry. There’s sadness here, and it is deep, but, deeper still, the truth, long feared, upon arrival, proves a relief. “I’m lost. I have forgotten how to live.” She repeats it like a prayer, to what or whom she doesn’t know. What Addie knows, and all she knows, is it’s the one true prayer that’s ever passed her lips.
Compared to it, the words she spoke in church, the vows that she exchanged with Harlan at the altar at St. Michael’s, “I take her…him…for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part,” are like something muttered in a dream. It comes to her that, once upon a time, someone who believed as she believes right now made up those words and then told others to believe and speak them, too. But those words were true just once, for that one person in the crucial, stinging hour of belief—not anymore. Now those words are dead, and when she and Harlan sleepwalked down the aisle and spoke them at the altar, they were just talking in their sleep. The only words that are fully wakeful and alive for Addie now are those she’s learned and ceaselessly repeats. And then she asks the question, “Will you help me?” and the voice she knows but doesn’t know from where says, Yes.
This is where Addie is when the first cock crows, and, hours later, when the gray light in the east turns celadon and silhouettes the trees. She’s on the edge of the water meadow she passed last night, or another like it. It’s carpeted with lily pads, sending up their celery-green stalks, hundreds of vertical brushstrokes, each culminating in a flag of yellow flower, all inclining the same way on the same breeze. There are wild roses on the bank, and scarlet lobelia. There are ferns and pink saltatia, and birds flitting over the water, streaks of canary yellow, blue, and red, and all around her on the ground is a dark green vine she’s never seen before, with tiny white flowers whose scent is that of orange blossoms. And it’s as if the world Addie knew has been destroyed, and, overnight, another, fresh, has been created to replace it, or as if Addie herself has been destroyed, and her destruction has allowed her to see the world that always was, only this is deeper than seeing. She beholds.
Addie has no wish to leave, or ever to return to that other, prior world, but then she hears them start to call for her. She he
ars the deep note of the horn, and in the distance, dogs begin to bark. It isn’t long before Sultan and another hound appear out of the trees, their sad old heads—like something time has both compressed and stretched—looking oddly out of place on their lithe bodies. They’re followed shortly by a man on horseback. It’s Jarry. She is not surprised, but Jarry clearly is. Dismounting with his horse in stride, he lets it stop itself and runs to her.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m all right.”
“Thank God.” He goes down on his hams in front of her. “We were afraid you’d drowned. Did you not hear us call?”
“I heard.”
He pauses at her tone. The hounds, with swifter intuition, begin to wag their tails. They make a happy rush and lap her face, and she, enduring it, closes her eyes and lifts her chin. “Such charity,” she says, gently pushing them away.
“Have you been here all night?”
“Much of it.”
“You must be freezing.”
She shakes her head, but Jarry drapes his coat across her shoulders nonetheless. “We should let them know.”
“Not yet,” she says, and Addie’s cold, smooth face, for the first time, looks haggard. Fatigue swirls up into her eyes, like mud in a clear pool. “Please?”
He reaches out and lays a hand—not his whole hand, just a finger, the middle one, and just the tip of that—on her shoulder. Its pressure is so light that Addie might not be aware of it unless she saw it there. Yet her body, which is clenched from the long night against the cold, opens like a bud to flower, sensing kindness with an intuition like the hounds’. Slowly, softly, she begins to cry.
