Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  “I’m sorry, Addie, at how poorly this began.”

  The sun is behind him; looking up, she has to shade her eyes. “Godspeed, my dear.”

  “I wish I could stay,” he says, but even with the sun behind him, Addie sees his eyes stray to the tree line and the road. In them is a sheen she’s seen in dogs before the hunt, and she can tell that, even as he speaks the words he thinks he means, he’s eager to be gone.

  “Go,” she tells him. “And know that I’ll pray always for your swift and safe return.”

  He leans down and kisses her, and then, at a soft canter, he rides away down the white road, toward the vanishing point where the lines of trees converge in the allée.

  Watching, Addie feels a subtle sense of letdown, and the clear thought comes to her, That wasn’t it…. Marriage hasn’t proved to be the plausible beginning of the beginning she had hoped. But under disappointment looms the sudden sense of possibility, the same she felt three days ago, standing in the Nina’s bows, as though perhaps now it, true life, can start.

  Harlan is gone now, and when she turns, the park opens like the green world of a fairy tale, and coming toward her through it, also moving in a kind of dream, is Jarry. As she waits, Addie’s heart is beating out a heavy klaxon in her chest, and she does not know why, or ask, or what will happen when he comes.

  When he arrives, she smiles, but he does not.

  “Yesterday, when we came back from the swamp,” he says, direct, without preliminaries, “you were about to tell me something….”

  Addie blinks. She holds her smile, but it grows fixed and out of touch with the false incomprehension in her eyes. “Was I? I was so confused then, Jarry, I hardly remember where I was. I’m afraid it’s slipped my mind.”

  He studies her doubtfully.

  “I’m sorry how it’s turned out,” she says. “I know it must be a disappointment to you.”

  He continues to regard her searchingly. “It’s not your fault,” he says, and as he walks away, she waits for the voice to speak, to thunder from the depths and tell her what this means. It doesn’t, though, and it occurs to Addie now it won’t. The voice, silent for so many years, has gone to ground again. And, after all, isn’t it a great relief? Why, then, does Addie feel bereft? The cup has passed, as Addie wished and prayed it would—why, then, the sudden, violent need to drink?

  THIRTY

  I’m thirsty, Daddy!” Hope whined from the backseat.

  “Me, too, Doddy—I firsty, too!”

  “We’ll get some water in a minute.”

  “I want juice!”

  “Quiet!” As the yellow light turned red on Meeting Street, Ran gunned it through the intersection. The driver of an eastbound car leaned on his horn, Dopplering angrily away down Broad, and Ransom, rattled by the Charleston traffic, watched him in the rearview and had to swerve to miss a tourist carriage. Jamming on the brake, he felt the ABS engage, stuttering underfoot. The passenger-side wheel scraped the curb and the Odyssey lurched forward, then rocked stiffly back to rest.

  “Are you all right?”

  From the back, the children regarded him in shocked and sober silence.

  As the hansom pulled around, the driver raised an open hand and stood up in the seat to glare. Ransom, feeling like a criminal, sat there with a pounding heart and told himself to breathe.

  “Who you trying to kill—yourself or someone else?” An elderly basket lady, who’d spread her wares on quilts before the courthouse, posed this question. It had, for Ransom, an ominously prophetic ring he knew well from prior episodes and well knew to distrust.

  Despite the dose of lithium he’d downed at Claire’s OB, he was deep in the dark tunnel now and days away from any hope of light. The profound unwisdom of his course struck home, as usual, in retrospect. Last night with Claire, he got his wish; today, he got the price. And here he was—and here they were. Again.

  “Let me get back to you on that,” he told the basket lady now. “We’re having a minor family meltdown here.”

  She shook her head and tsked, returning to the weaving in her lap.

  “I want ice keem, Doddy!” Charlie cried, demanding compensatory damages as he emerged from trance.

  “Well, you aren’t getting any,” Ransom said, “and that’s the end of that. It’s almost suppertime. I got you ice cream yesterday, and look where we are now.”

  That’s right, said the voice. It’s all the children’s fault for wanting ice cream yesterday, isn’t it? If not for that, you’d be sipping hurricanes on Easy Street and there’d be naked women fanning you with ostrich plumes and feeding you peeled grapes.

  If he’d known how, Ran would have plunged a karate knife-hand into his chest, grabbed the speaker by his ugly throat, and throttled him, or it. He lacked those skills, however, and it occurred to Ransom as a glancing thought that, whatever colorful and gruesome side effects he’d experienced when he’d gone off the reservation in the past, he’d never heard a voice—not one like this. So what was that about?

  The exigencies of parenthood allowed no leisure to contemplate the fine points of his medical and spiritual condition.

  “Can we at least listen to another song?” said Hope.

  “What’s wrong with this one?” On the deck, Robert Johnson was wailing “Hell Hound on My Trail.” “I thought you liked my music.”

  “Not twenty times,” Hope said. “Not twenty times, I don’t.”

  “It’s helping me,” said Ran with a quaver, feeling assailed from every side, within as well as without. Then he lost it. “Is that okay? I know I’m the grown-up here, and I’m supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent, but is it okay for me, for once, to need and maybe even get a little goddamn help?” This rose to a crescendo, and the last two words escaped him at a roar that shook the Odyssey like a tornado rattling a Kansas cellar door.

  His Master’s Voice, the nemesis piped up, and Ransom didn’t need to ask it what it meant.

  Hope’s blue eyes were filled with the same doubt Mel, once upon a time, had put in his, the doubt that Ran, coming here, had made it his business to remove. Worse, he knew from personal experience that the shout had made her doubt not him, the shouter, but herself. “What’s wrong, Daddy?” she asked in a much younger voice. “Did we do something wrong?”

  “No, it’s me,” he answered in a husky whisper. “It’s me, not you, okay?”

  At his confession, they both went to pieces, and Ransom, overwhelmed with guilt, felt his eyes brim and dropped his head against the wheel.

  “I firsty, Doddy!”

  “All right,” he said. “All right.”

  “You there, mister…” The basket lady snapped her fingers at the car, and Ransom frowned and turned, prepared to take her on.

  “There’s water in this cooler.” She jerked her chin toward the Igloo Playmate at her knee.

  Expecting conflict, Ransom blinked and made no move.

  “Get out of that car,” she said, “and get some water for that child.”

  Resentful of her tone, but inwardly relieved to follow orders, Ran got out and fetched a pony from the ice. “Thanks. How much?”

  She pressed her lips and shook her head, refusing to look at him.

  “Let me buy a basket then. How much is this?” He picked one up.

  “Twenty dollars.”

  “The tag says twenty-two.”

  “I reckon I can charge you twenty if I want to, can’t I?”

  Cheered by her irascibility, Ran took out his pocket roll and peeled a bill. “Here you go, Alberta.” He read the name from a cloth tag sewn cunningly into the reeds.

  She tucked it in her apron pocket, then visored her eyes and squinted up at him. “You in trouble, ain’t you?”

  “A small spot.”

  “You look like you in a whole heap.”

  “You’re an astute woman,” he said unresentfully.

  “Whatever it is, it ain’t worth that,” she said. “It ain’t worth yelling at your children. You know that,
don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said after a beat, “yes, actually I do.”

  “Sometime you got to step away,” she said. “Every parent ever lived had to do that some. Me, seem like I had to once or twice a day myself. Ain’t no shame to it.”

  A crack occurred to him—“Thanks for the lecture”—but he found the lecture steadying and held it back.

  “Do you mind if I let them stretch their legs?” he asked instead.

  “I don’t own the street,” Alberta said. “Much time as I spend out here, I ought to. They ought to named it after me at least, but they ain’t done it yet. That sign still says Meeting, don’t it?”

  Ransom smiled and nodded.

  “Not Alberta Johns?”

  “Not Alberta Johns.”

  “What’s your name, son?”

  “Ransom.”

  “Ransom what?”

  “Ransom Hill.”

  “Ransom, let your children get a drink.”

  He prompted the side door.

  “What’s your name, Miss Blue Eyes?” Alberta asked, giving her a bottle.

  Hope looked at him, and Ransom nodded.

  “Hope,” she said.

  “Know what this is?” Alberta nodded to the basket in her lap, a round shallow one three-quarters done, with the unwoven fibers radiating out like variegated spokes around a wheel. “What the old folks call a fanner. Used to winnow rice.”

  “What’s ‘winnow’?”

  “That means dividing the good part, what you eat, off from the chaff you give the hogs. I don’t reckon you ever fed no hogs, have you? Probably never even saw one.”

  “On TV.”

  “On TV. Come over here and let me show you how to weave. Want to try?”

  “I’d like to,” Hope said, “but I’m not allowed to talk to strangers.”

  “It’s okay, Hope,” said Ran.

  “And you there, little man,” Alberta said. “What’s your name?”

  “Cholly?”

  “Can you count, Charlie?”

  “One, two, free!” he said, breaking out in his sweet grin.

  “You see them baskets? Run down there to the end and put ’em in a stack for me. I got to leave here soon. Big on the bottom, little ones on top.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay’s okay,” Alberta said, “but can you say ‘Yes, ma’am’?”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  Charlie ran off happily engaged, and Ransom thought once more about the universal primer course on parenting—Alberta Johns had clearly taken an advanced degree. Despite his problem with authority, he was grateful to surrender team command, grateful to step back into the ranks and be a PFC. Staring south down the block, his eye lit on a big Georgian double house across the street, and Ransom, granted the opportunity to breathe and gladly taking it, contemplated his next move….

  Having failed—despite a second, more exhaustive daylight search—to find the Purdey, he’d driven straight downtown intending to come clean with Sergeant Thomason. As he passed the station with the children, though, a young cop on the steps had shot a dark, suspicious glance his way, and Ransom suddenly worried that, without the gun in hand, a confession might raise more questions than it answered and increase suspicions he’d thereby hoped to quell. On balance, it seemed best to keep moving, keep moving, like Robert Johnson’s ghost was singing in the Odyssey right now. There was a story here, as Thomason had pointed out, and even if it happened a long time ago, before he was even born, Ran had begun to wonder and to worry—prompted by that little voice that, as time went on, seemed less and less familiar—that maybe that old story had something to do with him after all, something to do with all of them. To make that determination, first he had to find out what the story was. His gaze homed in on the second-story window of what Ran felt fairly confident was the Music Room, and he prayed Aunt Tildy would be home.

  “This here’s bulrush, and this one’s sweetgrass,” Alberta said to Hope, running a supple strand between her fingers to arm’s length. “Smell that, ain’t it nice? My mama used to smell of that, and that was just about her color, too. Me, I’m like this dark here in the coil. That’s pine straw, and this one…who you reckon this one is?” Alberta laid a pale frond, ribbon-width, against Hope’s arm and smiled.

  “Me?”

  “Um-hm. That’s palmetto, sugar. The rush and grass what make it strong, but the palmetto holds it all together. That’s the thread you use to sew the coil. And this here, see? This is your needle. Ain’t nothing but a old spoon you cut the bowl off and file flat. Now lookahere. You tuck it in and pull it through, and then you tuck it back and pull it out, in and out, and back and through…. See how I do? You try it now.”

  Alberta gave the spoon to Hope, and Ransom watched his daughter weaving brown with white and white with brown and brown with white again. As the old woman turned the basket clockwise in her lap by slow degrees, the spiral mesmerized him, and the different-colored strands rayed out around the central disk no longer seemed like spokes so much as sunbeams, checkered sunbeams radiating from a checkered sun, and it was not completed yet…It was being woven still, by this old woman and this girl, hands black and white, but it was far along and had to be completed at all costs.

  Something had seized hold of Ran. He felt the small hairs stand along his back and remembered now what he always forgot, the deeper reason why he strayed from his chemical regime. Sex was the least part of it; the real reason was because there always came a point where what he had no longer felt like a disease. There came a point when he contacted something in himself he trusted more than medicines or doctors, more, even, than he trusted Claire, his wife. Standing on the west side of Meeting Street in Charleston, before the courthouse, opposite the church, Ran had reached that point again, and he smelled the sea air now and caught the clop of hooves receding on the cobblestones. The shhhh of traffic sounded like breath exhaled, and he noticed the light now, that special September light you find only in Charleston, on late afternoons, from four p.m. and on. Ran, at least, had seen it nowhere else, still broad day away up there, so blue and high, rinsed clean, where seagulls wheeled, while down here, closer to the ground, shadows had begun to fall.

  Hard to tell what’s in a person’s heart by looking in their face, Mr. Hill. Awful hard. Sergeant Thomason’s objection surfaced, and Ransom, looking at Alberta, gave it due consideration before putting it aside. That lesson was from the basic course; Ransom, now, had moved on to advanced.

  “Alberta?”

  She looked up and frowned, as though remembering him unwillingly.

  “I’ve got to speak to someone down the street. You see that house?” He pointed, and she turned her head.

  “That’s Miss Tildy DeLay’s,” she said. “What you want with her? You ain’t going to knock her in the haid and take her jew’ry, are you?”

  “She’s my aunt,” said Ran.

  “Your aunt?” Alberta studied him. “Git on out from here, boy! You ain’t got the bones to come from that!”

  Ransom frowned. “You’re a discerning woman, Alberta—we’ve established that. I need your help. Can you watch the children while I go?”

  “Watch your children…”

  “For ten minutes. Fifteen, tops.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” she said indignantly. “You don’t know me, boy. I could be the devil in blue suede shoes.”

  Ran stared deep into Alberta’s deep experienced old eyes and shook his head. “No, uh-uh, I don’t think so. No one who weaves lines that straight can have a crooked heart. You know I’m right.”

  “You wrong is what I think. You most seriously wrong.”

  “It’s important, Alberta.”

  “Take ’em with you then.”

  Ransom shook his head. “I can’t. If I was on fire, Tildy wouldn’t piss on me to put it out, but this trouble I’m in, Alberta? Tildy’s the only hope of help I’ve got. I can’t handle the children and her both. I’ll pay you a hundred dollars.”


  “A hundred dollars?”

  “Make it two,” he said. “A hundred now and another hundred when I come back out.”

  “Lord have mercy.” Alberta clucked her tongue and looked away. “I hope you ain’t the devil come to tempt me.”

  “I hope so, too,” said Ran. “I’m pretty sure I’m not.”

  “Pretty sure ain’t all that comforting.”

  “That’s why I’m leaving them with you. Is it a deal or not?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Fifteen, tops.” He held out the bill, and she hesitated, then snatched it.

  “Fifteen means fifteen,” she said. “It don’t mean fifteen and a half.”

  “Thank you, Alberta. Thank you very much. You see that window? I’ll be standing there the whole time looking down. If you need me, just wave and I’ll come running. And if they disappear, Alberta, if my children disappear even for a second and a half…” He turned the basket and nodded to the tag. “Just remember, I know where you live.”

  “Don’t start threatening,” she said. “I ain’t going to take ’em. What I want to take ’em for?”

  “Here’s her number.” Ran handed her the card he’d lifted from Claire’s Rolodex, together with his cell phone. “Call me if you need me, and listen, Alberta, if anything goes wrong…and I mean seriously wrong, I mean an emergency…See this? You hit this key—number 2—and hold it down, and it’ll dial their mother. Her name is Claire. Don’t call her unless you really have to, Alberta, hear me? But if you have to, don’t even blink. These children are everyth—” Suddenly Ransom had to suck his breath and look away.

  “Well, don’t start bawling in the middle of the street,” she said. “I watched plenty of children in my time and never lost one yet. I reckon I can watch two more for fifteen minutes.”

  “Okay, Hope,” Ran said to his daughter, who’d been attending to this negotiation with an expression of profound misgiving. “Charlie, bring it in. Listen, guys, Alberta’s going to look after you for a few minutes while I run down the block. I won’t be long, okay? You mind your manners, do what she says, and don’t go near the street.”