Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  “And I hope he grows up,” Ran said, “both him and Hope, and never do to another human being what you and yours have done to me for nineteen years, which was to judge me, sight unseen, before I ever walked into the room. In all that time, you never had the imagination—or the respect for Claire—to wonder who I really was and what she loved in me, much less the generosity to support her choice. I hope our children grow up and listen to my songs and think, Hey, once upon a time, my dad wrote that, and some kids who were struggling and lost and mad as hell, weighed down by a lot of bullshit piled on top of them in homes like this, listened to his words and took permission to go out and free themselves, or, at least, encouragement to shoot for it. You may not see it, Tildy, but I pray Hope and Charlie do, and I believe they will. I’ll put what I’ve done beside you and your whole line, and let my children weigh them in the scales and then decide. And you know what else? I think that’s what Claire did, too, and what you really can’t forgive me for. She had all this, all the Charleston pride and antecedents, and she walked into a dingy New York City club one night and heard me playing rock and roll and threw it all away. She scraped it off the bottoms of her shoes like so much dogshit, which is really what it is.”

  “Your language is disgusting,” Tildy said. “Claire acted out of youthful folly, and now, from the perspective of maturer years, she sees the cost.”

  “That’s your opinion,” Ran replied. “Mine is: Claire was the best she ever was with me, the truest to herself, and I believe, deep down—even from the perspective of ‘maturer years’—she knows it, too, which is why we’re going to make it, whether you like it or not.”

  “If you mean to make your marriage work, why aren’t you up there with Claire and your two children, instead of down here harrying me?”

  Ransom frowned and turned away. “Because I have to find out what happened to them,” he said, suddenly struggling to hold his train of thought.

  “Why?” persisted Tildy. “What do Harlan and Adelaide DeLay have to do with you and Claire? What conceivable connection could there be?”

  She’s right, you know, the voice piped up from the peanut gallery.

  “Shut up,” said Ransom, clutching his temples.

  “Whom are you addressing?” she demanded.

  Now Ransom looked at her with his red, harried eyes, and she looked back.

  “You’re not in your right mind,” she said.

  “Just help me, Tildy,” Ran implored. “I don’t know why it’s important, I just know it is. Help me figure out what happened, and I’ll leave.”

  “What happened is, he shot her and then turned the gun back on himself from simple shame and self-disgust.”

  “And then?”

  “What do you mean, ‘and then’?”

  “I mean, if Harlan killed her and then blew his own brains out, he could hardly proceed to get up, dig a hole, and bury himself and Addie after he was dead.”

  “Spare me yo’ irony,” Tildy said. “Obviously, someone else buried them.”

  “Who? The nigras?”

  “For heaven’s sake, anybody could have! What difference does it make?”

  “Quite a bit,” said Ran. “Let’s say you’re invited to someone’s home for Sunday dinner. You knock and no one answers. You go in and find the wife and husband dead of gunshot wounds. Wouldn’t you call someone? Notify the sheriff? Wouldn’t it stand to reason they’d be buried in the family plot, in coffins, not fifty yards away in unmarked, shallow graves? Wouldn’t some word have come down to us? I mean, word came down they’d disappeared. If they’d been murdered, wouldn’t it have come down all the more?”

  “All this is idle speculation,” she said, and her fierce eyes strayed from his for the first time. “Maybe no one knew.”

  “But someone had to know. Whoever buried them knew and chose to keep it secret. And if you were the murderer, wouldn’t that count as a pretty good incentive for you to shut your trap?”

  “I won’t abet your obsessions by engaging further in this pointless exercise.”

  “But it isn’t pointless, Tildy. The point is, maybe Harlan didn’t kill her after all. Maybe he didn’t off himself. Maybe someone else murdered both of them and buried their remains. The questions being, who, and why.”

  Tildy sat, lips pursed in a recalcitrant way, and Ransom noticed that her spotted hands had turned white on the head of her cane. “You know something, don’t you?”

  “What do you mean? I’ve told you everything I know.”

  “Look at you, you’re blushing!”

  “You’re mad. Stark raving.”

  “Call it madman’s intuition, then. Tildy, for the love of God, if you know something, don’t hold out on me. It’s not just me, it’s Claire and Hope and Charlie, too.”

  She sat there, fuming, undecided; then with her cane’s trembling rubber tip, she tapped—tapped unerringly—a sterling frame, hidden far back in the thickets of family photos on the piano. “There is this. I don’t think it will tell you much.”

  Ransom picked it up. Though her face was slightly out of focus, he recognized Addie right away. She was standing on the piazza at Wando Passo, leaning on the point of a closed parasol. She looked tireder, more prosaic than the woman in the portrait, but more real and solid, too, and as Ran squinted at her, Addie squinted back, as though she could almost make him out, as though Ran were the figure in her dream, or fantasy. After the first moment, though, it wasn’t Addie but the handsome black man standing beside her in the shadow of the overhang that drew Ran’s attention. With his solemn stare and coat of good but slightly worn black gabardine, he looked familiar somehow, though Ransom couldn’t immediately say how.

  “Who’s this?” he asked.

  “Open it,” she said.

  Turning the frame, he struggled with the fittings, but all he found, when the blue velvet back came off, was a single line in antique cursive: “A. H. D. with J., Wando Passo, Aug., 1865.”

  “‘A. H. D.,’” said Ran.

  “Adelaide Huger DeLay. She married my great-grandfather, Harlan. He was the son of Percival there.” She pointed to a young man’s portrait on the wall. “Adelaide and Harlan had a son named James. The property passed through him to my father.”

  “Yours and Clive’s?”

  “Mine and Clive’s.”

  “And ‘J.’?”

  “A slave named Jarry. I know little about him except that he was plantation steward.”

  “Why was this picture taken?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why would the mistress—Addie—pose for a picture with a slave?”

  Tildy frowned and tightened her grip on her cane. “Happenstance, I expect.”

  “And you showed me this because…?”

  She glared at him, recalcitrant, and the doors slid back.

  “Oh, what?” said Tildy, with annoyance.

  Della merely blinked and didn’t go away.

  “All right, all right,” she said, struggling to rise.

  As Tildy hobbled off, Ran’s eye lit once more on the portrait. At second glance, something in Percival DeLay’s expression seemed familiar, too. Ran gazed into his agated, dark hazel eyes, then back down at the black man in the photo.

  “Who the hell are you?” he said, addressing “J.” “Who the hell are you?”

  The mystery engrossed him deeply, so deeply that it took Charlie’s tearful “Doddy! Doddy!” to pull Ran from the undertow.

  “What’s the matter, buddy?” Ran knelt and took him in his arms. Over Charlie’s shoulder, Percival and J. gazed on…. Ran blinked at them, blinked down at his son’s unhappy face, his agated, dark hazel eyes. Like a boulder on a mountaintop, something in Ran’s mind began to teeter.

  Before it had a chance to roll, Hope filed in, followed in short order by Alberta Johns, Tildy, Della, and a frowning, blue-clad female representative of the Charleston police. From the doorway, they glared at him as though he were, in fact, what Ran, in his worst nightmare,
had feared he was and, till this moment, hesitated to believe.

  Alberta was holding something out to him—a gun? Sadly, no. Not that, nor a remote. It was, in fact, his cell phone. The dial was lit. The basket lady looked at him with dour eyes. “Someone wants to speak to you,” she said.

  THIRTY-THREE

  As the fever advances, it grows more regular, and, with each repetition, worse. Every second night, between five and eight, Addie’s chills begin, succeeding rapidly to fever, which rages through the night, all the following day, worsening toward evening. Addie’s pulse accelerates to the point where Sims can no longer accurately count it. Her mouth fills with a foul, viscous phlegm. Lapsing into delirium, she lies whimpering and gnashing her teeth, and as she struggles to breathe, her chest heaves like a panting animal’s on a summer day. Toward dawn, the fever breaks and she passes into a debilitated rest. The reprieve lasts between ten and twelve hours. Then, as the shadows lengthen toward dusk, it starts again. From onset to onset, the cycle lasts forty-eight hours, and with each onset, Paloma ties another knot.

  There’s one knot in the string when Jarry leaves for Charleston. Using cedar bark and pitch to caulk the seams of Wando Passo’s lighter—the oakum, too, has been a casualty of the Nina’s encounter with the Niagara—Jarry loads the boat with rice and sets out with an eight-man crew. The freshet is running, and the men must bight a line to trees along the riverbank and warp themselves upstream by the capstan. It takes ten backbreaking hours to reach the railroad bridge at Mars Bluff and most of the night to unload the lighter and get the cargo up the steep embankment to the train. There are two hundred tierces of rice. Each weighs six hundred pounds. This is sixty tons of rice, more than a tenth of Wando Passo’s annual production. In Charleston—where every public space, from Washington Race Course to White Point Garden, is filled with tents—Jarry sells the lighter load for three cents a pound, $3,600. Despite this sum, despite Blanche Huger’s fervent, and at times hysterical, exertions, Jarry succeeds in procuring only fifty grains of quinine. There is no more to be had at any price.

  There are four knots in the string the morning he returns. He has ridden all night, and his eyes are red and glassy. His pants are soaked with his horse’s sweat, his boots flecked with lather.

  “It’s half of what I hoped,” Sims says, “but more than what we had.”

  He prescribes three grains the first day, four the second, and so on, up to six on the fourth day. On the fifth and sixth, he gives Addie eight grains at twelve-hour intervals. By the afternoon of the seventh day, she’s had no recurrence in forty-eight hours. She’s sitting up in bed and showing evidence of life. Jarry brings her gifts from the garden—fragole Alpine, and sugar snaps, and salsify, and the season’s first small cimbelines, which is what Peter calls his yellow crook-necked squash.

  “These taste like summer,” she tells Jarry, breaking a snap with a crisp report and offering him the second half. “I never knew food could taste like this.”

  Jarry smiles at her elation.

  “So my fears were groundless after all. I wronged Clarisse in thinking ill of her.”

  He doesn’t contradict, but something narrows in his eyes.

  “Jarry, thank you.” She takes his hand from his lap and presses it. Their access to each other—exciting, fearful, without apparent cause—seems unimpaired. Addie can almost forget her guilty secret, gazing into his eyes, which reflect her in a way no eyes ever have. It’s as if she’s suddenly the person she was always meant to be, who has eluded every effort on her part, but now, with none at all, in Jarry’s beholding, she has suddenly become.

  “Shall I read to you?” he asks.

  “Unless you purpose Wordsworth…”

  “No, I doubt you’re yet strong enough for that.”

  She allows her eyes to widen at the slyness in his tone. “You have a spark of evil in you, don’t you, Jarry? Impertinent, purest evil. I never noticed that till now.”

  He colors, smiles, and makes no effort to refute her charge.

  “You know what I should like far better, though? A walk,” she says. “No, no, don’t deny me. Please. I’ve been cooped up here so long. A breath of fresh air and a few stray beams of sunlight on my face—that would do me more good than all the poetry on earth. May we? Just to the Bluffs and back?”

  “Are you sure it’s not too soon?”

  “If I fall over, you may say, ‘I told you so.’ You may even bring your Wordsworth. I’ll steel myself to suffer through a verse.”

  “It may prove better medicine than you expect.”

  “Its medicinal properties are not in doubt.”

  So off they go, this fine June morning, down the white sand road. As they pass the barn, the sound of female laughter draws them.

  Inside, a group of long-legged teenage girls, with shimmies showing and skirts hiked halfway up their thighs, are treading barefoot in a soup of dark gray mud. An older man named Jonadab sloshes this from a piggin he fills at a barrel of river water mixed with clay. Conscious of his attention—and that of several older male admirers standing by—the girls dance a kind of sensual minuet, half slip and slide, laughing and shouting protests when a bombardier, hidden in the loft, releases a drift of well-aimed seed that lodges in their headcloths and their hair, before they brush it off and tramp it down.

  “What on earth?” asks Addie.

  “They’re claying the seed for tomorrow’s planting,” Jarry tells her. “Have you never seen it done?”

  “You can’t pretend it’s any kind of work?”

  Though Addie laughs to show how much she cares, one girl takes umbrage at the charge. “Yes, ma’am, it is. If it ain’t clayed, the seed’ll float up when you put water on de fiel’, and then the buds duh et it up.”

  “The birds?”

  “Yes’m, de buds, like I said.”

  “Well, you’ve taught me something I didn’t know.”

  “Iss awright, miss,” she says, extending charity.

  “They almost,” she says to Jarry as they continue, “make me remember what it was to be that young and that untroubled. You’d never think that there are hostile armies in the field.”

  “Children will still play, though there be war.”

  “Is that a proverb?”

  “I think you take some pleasure in twitting me.”

  “It’s not my most attractive quality, I’m sure,” she answers with a high color in her cheeks. “Yet it does me far more good than Wordsworth ever could. You wouldn’t deny me it, surely?”

  And he is flustered now.

  “Have I embarrassed you? I have! Oh, Jarry, I didn’t mean…”

  “You didn’t.”

  She studies him, her hand upon her breast, and they are at the river now.

  “Look how beautiful it is!” Giving him an intentional reprieve from her attention, she turns away and finds charm in the blue and yellow jessamine in riot on the banks. There’s an egret, poised on one leg, fishing in the shallows on the opposite shore, and a row of turtles—nine of them, lined up shell to shell upon a log—black against the water’s dazzle. “Why does the sky seem so much bigger here?”

  Recovered now, Jarry shakes his head.

  “What does it mean, though, Jarry?” she says, thinking of a question that has several times occurred to her. “Wando Passo? Is it Spanish?”

  “No.”

  “Indian?”

  “There was a tribe, the Wando, hereabouts. The creek there”—now he points—“cuts between the Pee Dee and the Waccamaw, and they may have used it to reach the English trading post that once sat on these bluffs. Father thought it might have been a kind of pidgin that arose between two peoples who didn’t share a common tongue. Wando Passo…”

  “A place the Wando passed?”

  He nods. “That’s just a guess, though. The truth is, no one knows.”

  “How strange,” she says. “To think that once upon a time it meant enough to them to name their land for it, but now it’s lost, an
d those who knew the meaning are all gone.”

  “I’ve always rather liked it.”

  “So do I. It’s like the past, isn’t it?” She gazes at him, wondering. “Something you can’t quite grasp, however hard you try, that lives on nonetheless and casts its spell on us.”

  Jarry smiles, and briefly, as he holds her stare, there is a kind of spell between them, too.

  “Truly, though,” says Addie, breaking it, “the people here—are they not worried by the war?”

  “Of course they are.”

  “I suppose they hope for our defeat. You do, don’t you?” She casts a glance at him.

  “I’ve made no secret of my views. But, no, not everybody in the quarters shares them.”

  “How do they feel?”

  “The older people worry what will happen to their homes if the South loses. They ask me about their spring and winter cloth allotments, their firewood—will this continue as before.”

  “And what do you tell them?”

  “That when and if they’re freed, they’ll own themselves and they may sell their labor and buy these things themselves. They don’t entirely trust the notion of a future different from the past.”

  “How will this place work, Jarry, if we lose?”

  He walks to the edge and stares over the prospect, hands clasped behind his back. “Not as it does now. That’s the only answer I’m certain of. All of this is predicated on slave labor. If you must begin to pay for what you’ve always had for free, the question becomes, how much will the labor cost? More than the prof it the rice returns? If that’s so, what will happen to Wando Passo and places like it? Will they be abandoned to go back to the swamp? And what will happen to the people in the quarters and thousands like them across the South? What will happen to you, the owners?” He turns back now. “Your primary asset has always been the land. If you must sell off parcels to purchase labor to farm the rest—and if all the other landowners are in the same position—how much will the land be worth? Not much, in my view.”