Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  “You take a dark view of the future, then.”

  “I think there are solutions, but they require a shift in thinking I’m not sure either side, the slaves or masters, is prepared to make.”

  “Tell me what you mean.”

  “It’s long been my view that Wando Passo could produce a third more than it does.”

  “A million and a half pounds a year?”

  “Or thereabouts.”

  “How?”

  He sits beside her on the bench and turns with hands clasped and elbows on his knees. “I could show you, I believe. Tim and Silas have the rice drills on Beard Island this morning. Tomorrow, once the seed has soaked, we’ll plant. The two squares there yielded—I’d have to check—but twenty-six or -seven bushels, I would guess, last year. If I said to Tim tonight, ‘This year you’re going to rent Beard Island from the mistress…. You will pay her…’ I haven’t thought this out, you understand?”

  “No, of course,” says Addie, watching his intensity and not wanting to break the train.

  “Let’s say ten bushels to the acre.” He gets up and starts to pace. “For the sake of argument, ten. If they throw the seed onto the ground tomorrow and go home and stay drunk until September, they’ll make ten. But if they have advantage of the weather and work the land as they know how, they’ll make forty bushels on those fields.”

  “Forty!”

  “If not forty-five. If you take your ten and half of the additional thirty or thirty-five, you’ll do as well or better than you did last year.”

  “Why not ask that they make forty-five for me?”

  He laughs. “It can’t be done! Tell me how to do it. I’ve tried everything—exhortation, shaming, punishment. I’ve appealed to pride and manhood. None of it has ever worked. The one thing I haven’t tried—because I’ve never had authority—is to let them share the profits. If you want excellence from them, that’s what you must do. Then, what I believe you’ll see is this: a hand like Tim, who now hoes out his half acre by ten thirty or eleven in the morning and goes home to tend his peas and shoats, then you’ll see him in the field till five or six. Instead of one task, he’ll do three or four, and because every third hand is capable of this, if you extend this over the whole plantation, you make your million and a half where you only have a million now. If I’m wrong, if they shirk and malinger, all you stand to lose is a few bushels on two fields out of almost fifty. Wouldn’t it be worth it to find out?”

  “I think it would,” says Addie, swept up in his excitement.

  “Then I have your permission to propose this to them?”

  “Yes, you do,” she says. “Only, not tonight. Hold off for a few days. I must write to Harlan first.”

  “Ah,” says Jarry, deflating as though punctured by a pin. “Ah, well then, never mind.”

  “But why never mind?” she protests. “You think he won’t agree?”

  “I know it.”

  “How?” she challenges. “How do you know? Perhaps you do him an injustice.”

  “I know because I’ve asked. I made a similar proposal to Father once, and Harlan would have none of it.”

  “What was his objection?”

  “Can’t you guess? Wando Passo presently produces a million pounds that he has all the profit of. So why should he change everything to produce an additional half million to profit someone else.”

  “Is that not a fair point?”

  “Don’t you see the answer, though? The reason you risk changing everything is to save yourself. In the event the South loses, to preserve the million you have now, you must make the million and a half and give the overage to those who presently own nothing. If you don’t, you’ll lose the million, and once you lose the million, you stand to lose the land as well.”

  “Did you explain this to my husband?”

  “Harlan understands it. But to lift them into a prosperity that, however modest, he considers undeserved galls him more than the thought of ruining himself, and you.”

  “I find that hard to credit, Jarry,” she says, with a trace of coolness.

  “Do you? I think his view is fairly common. If it weren’t, slavery could have been ended in this country long ago according to the principle I’ve laid out. But it’s a rare man who’ll voluntarily surrender power over another, even when it’s in his ultimate best interest. Harlan, whatever his qualities, isn’t such a man.”

  It’s true! It’s true! thinks Addie with despair. Everything that Jarry says is true. So what is this strange compunction she feels stealing over her, the one that makes her stiffen and inquire, “And you thought I would consent to what my husband has expressly forbidden?”

  Jarry weighs her tone and answers quietly. “I thought you might recognize that preserving the privileges you have, which are considerable, would be preferable to losing them.”

  “I think you know,” she says, “I think you full well know I can’t make changes, radical changes, on my husband’s property without seeking his consent.”

  “I see,” he says. “I would have thought that you, as mistress, in his absence, could do pretty much what you have a mind to do.”

  “Then we disagree on this. I see no point in continuing in this vein.”

  “I agree,” says Jarry, sitting straight now, backing away from her. “This conversation is a waste of breath.”

  “Will you read to me?”

  “I have no stomach for it now. If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.” He gets up and walks away from her, and she is on the verge, on the very cusp, of saying to him, “I should like it very much if you would read.”

  She doesn’t, though.

  Later, sitting at her dressing table mirror, she’ll reflect on how close she came to doing this, to giving him an order, in effect, that he’d have been in no position to refuse.

  And what if I’m like that, too? she wonders, staring at her image in the glass. What if I’m like Harlan in this way? Isn’t this, at bottom, why she hasn’t surrendered the secret of the will? Because it gives her power over Jarry? Isn’t she as reluctant to surrender that as Harlan would be to give away the profit on a half million pounds of rice? Yet her secret power also has a poisoned quality that makes her queasy. Or is the queasiness something else?

  Suddenly Addie notices her eyes. Her pupils have dilated to the size of dimes. And there’s something else. Leaning close, she sees, at her temple, where her hair is fairest—almost colorless, like fronds of dandelion—a coarse black hair. Was it there before? How could she have never noticed it? And as she reaches up to touch it, to spread it between her fingers for a closer look, Addie startles when she sees it twitch.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  This lady here, Ms. Johns,” said the blue-clad female representative of the PD, “says you offered her a hundred bucks to take your kids.”

  The officer, Alberta, Tildy, Della, and Hope—yes, Hope as well—representing a pretty fair cross section of female Charleston, Southern womanhood, das Ewig-Weibliche itself, regarded Ran with unanimously grim looks, a hanging jury itching to convict.

  “To watch them,” Ransom qualified. “To watch them for fifteen. What’s the big deal? They’re okay, aren’t they? Aren’t you okay, guys?” He addressed the children now.

  “Charlie has a poopy diaper, Dad,” Hope said, in an accusing tone she’d heretofore reserved for Claire.

  “I wet, Doddy,” said Charlie, with eyes like rain-sheeted windowpanes. His bottom lip—which was full, like Claire’s (somehow Ran had never noticed this till now)—was trembling.

  “Okay, buddy,” Ran said, stricken. “Okay, we’ll get you changed.”

  Ransom!

  “Shut up,” he said under his breath, smiling at his posse of accusers—who clearly heard him speak—like the honoree at a black-tie benefit who’s farted, loudly, in the middle of his speech. Belatedly, Ran realized the tinny voice he heard was Claire’s.

  “Hello?” he said into the phone.

  “Ransom, what the hell is goin
g on?” she said. “Why are you in Charleston?”

  “They found the bodies, Claire.”

  “What?” she said. “What bodies? Who found them? What are you talking about?”

  “Harlan and Adelaide.”

  Dead air, a sound like distant surf.

  “Let me speak to Aunt Tildy,” Claire said, measured now. “No, never mind. Tell her I’m coming down there. Don’t move. I’ll be there in an hour, forty-five.”

  “It isn’t necessary, Claire,” he said. “I’m on the case. We’ve got it under control, don’t we, kids?”

  Hope and Charlie looked at him with tombstone eyes.

  “We’ll be home by suppertime,” he said.

  “Don’t move,” said Claire. “Don’t you fucking move an inch. You hear me, Ransom Hill?”

  “Sure, sweetie, absolutely. Understood.” Like a harried first executive in the presidential bunker, Ran contemplated the red button and then pressed it, inviting unknown consequences—the end of civilization as we know it, of life on earth. “Call ended,” said the LCD. A little check mark wrote and then erased itself. Ran turned back to the hanging jury with a smile. “Okay, dutes, Mommy’s on her way. She’ll be here in an hour. Everything’s copacetic. Come on, bud….” When he reached for Charlie’s hand, however, the officer stepped between.

  “What? I can’t take my own son to the bathroom?” He allowed a note of parental righteousness into his tone. “You’re welcome to come with us.”

  The policewoman frowned. “When you’re done, there’s some things we need to straighten out.”

  “Absolutely. I’d like to straighten out a couple things myself. We’ll have a straightening convention.” He hoisted Charlie with one arm and cut a glance toward Alberta. “You could’ve cut me a bit more slack, Bert.”

  “It ain’t about you. It’s about these babies. You take care of ’em, hear me? Remember what we said.” She gripped him, and Ransom, with a thickening in his throat, a stinging at his eyes, looked down at her black hand on his white arm.

  “I guess you want your other hundred.”

  Alberta tsked impatiently and disengaged.

  “Hope?” Ran reached her his free hand.

  “I don’t need to go.”

  “Come on. You haven’t used the bathroom since we left.”

  Her frown was mutinous. She held her ground.

  “Don’t mess with me,” said Ransom, suddenly putting on the face of power and channeling his father’s voice.

  Hope came then. Downstairs, past the Piranesi scenes, beneath the gasolier…

  “There’s nothing wrong with it,” he muttered, staring upward as they passed.

  “Who are you talking to?” Hope asked.

  “To you, Pete,” he replied. “Tell the truth, now, honest Injun: don’t you think that chandelier is cool?”

  Hope looked at it and blinked, then looked at him and blinked some more. Suddenly, she was Claire. Four years old, she got the thing that Tildy meant, the thing he never got, however many times it was explained. Her expression didn’t judge, it pitied him because he never would.

  Ransom felt a tremor in his throat. “Come on, Charlie-boy, let’s do this thang! Who wants ice cream afterward?”

  “I do!” Charlie said. “Me! Me! Me!”

  Hope said nothing. Careful not to look at her, Ran felt like a lifeguard as the line that held his little girl slipped, burning, through his hand.

  After he changed Charlie’s diaper and helped him wash his hands, Ran knelt, face-to-face with them, a hand on each small hip. “Listen, guys, I need your help again. There’s been a little change of plan. We’re going to take a ride.”

  “Where we going, Doddy?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Ran.

  “What about Mommy?”

  “Don’t worry, Pete. We’ll see her later.”

  “Okay, Doddy.” Charlie blinked his little mismatched blink and nodded. He was in.

  “Hope?” he said, and swallowed.

  “Do we have to?”

  Ransom took a sighing breath. “No, you can stay, if you want to. But I’d really like it if you came.”

  Hope just pressed her lips and nodded, giving him a gift that her expression said might be the last.

  Ransom leaned and kissed her cheek. “Okay, upsy daisy! Everybody climb!”

  With that, he threw the window up, and out they went.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Quién hizo esto a ella?”

  “Tu sabes, Mamá.”

  “I don’t believe it,” says Paloma, stretching the skin on Addie’s temple, examining what lies between her index finger and her thumb.

  “¿Quién podría haberlo hecho?”

  The second voice is Jarry’s. Addie—wanting only to sleep, to escape into unconsciousness—notes him and his mother in the room, hears their gravity of tone, but notes it only as one detail among others, none of them important. They’re talking about her the way people talk about someone who’s dying, or in imminent danger thereof. Is she going to? Until a little while ago, the idea would have seemed preposterous—to die before life has begun? Death, though, now, from Addie’s vantage, is only a word, another unimportant detail among unimportant details. Her dwindling reserves are wholly vested in the wish to sleep, that and in summoning the strength to take this breath, and the next one after that, when her chest feels so tender, so wounded and so raw, and each breath is like a drought of fire. And the headache. Her head is ringing like an anvil hammered by a maul. The vibration shivers down into the pit of her stomach, making her feel she may vomit at any time.

  “No lo creeré.”

  “Don’t believe it, then,” says Jarry. “Just help her.”

  “Why?” the old woman says. “Why should we help her, hijo?”

  “Because she’s innocent.”

  “She’s not. This woman looked into my face and lied to me over your father’s corpse.”

  “I don’t believe that. And even if she did, does she deserve to die for it?”

  “Everything we bled and sweated for, she steps into possession of it all—how is she innocent?”

  “If it were me,” he says, touching her shoulder, “you would not allow this.”

  “You are my child,” Paloma says, “my son.”

  “If I am, then do for her what you would for me. Do it for me, Mamacita.”

  Paloma frowns. “Fetch me albahaca from the garden, and holy water in a vial.”

  Reaching into the neck of her dress, she takes out her makuto, the leather amulet she wears, and from the pouch, carefully folded, the prayer to San Luis Beltrán, written in the hand of Tata Quien Vence, the nom de guerre of Andrés Petit. Three times nightly for three nights running they say this prayer over her—“Criatura de Dios, yo te curo, ensalmo, y bendigo en nombre de la Santísima Trinidad, Padre, Hijo y Espíritu Santo…”—sprinkling her with holy water as they pray and making the sign of the cross with basil leaves. By the fourth dawn, however, the fever is undiminished. There are fourteen knots in the string now, twenty-eight days of illness. Addie, physically, has become a wreck. It’s become an almost insuperable battle simply to force herself to breathe.

  “The bilongo is not familiar to me,” Paloma says. “It’s very strong.”

  “Can you set the Fiery Wall?”

  She gives Jarry a hard look. “You expect me to set a black light on my child?”

  “Then don’t use graveyard dirt. Throw the candle in the river.”

  “And have it carry her away? No, I won’t work against her.”

  Jarry takes her hand. “If she dies, Mama—how can it help Clarisse? It won’t. It’ll just be something else on her account, something else for which she’ll have to pay. And what has Addie done to suffer this?”

  Far down in the dark world where she is—like one at the bottom of the sea, gazing up toward sunlight and the white sand beach—Addie hears him plead for her. It’s the first time she’s heard him use her given name, and this fills her with path
os—not as something that might be, but what might once have been.

  “We’ll try angélica,” Paloma says, but roots, too, fail, and there are sixteen knots in the string now.

  “There must be something else, Mama,” Jarry says.

  “There is one last thing. If it fails, I don’t know….”

  “Then try it, Mama, try the one last thing.”

  Paloma frowns at him. “Bring her, then,” she says, and leaves the room.

  As Jarry picks her up, Addie, far down in her world, alone and frightened, whispers, “Why? Why are you doing this for me?”

  He stares into her eyes, incredulous. “Why? Because you are a human being. Because you’d do the same for me.”

  Wretched, she closes her eyes and turns her face away. And she is like a shot corsage, crushed against him as he carries her downstairs. His arms are a place of refuge Addie’s missed and longed for. So why now? she wonders. Why does the nearness of death grant them a permission denied in life? She can smell dust in his black coat, and sweat, a pleasing sourness like salt. Addie thinks about the blocks in the dairy yard and in the horses’ stalls, licked into beautiful grotesqueries by need.

  Through a gray pall of dispirited languor, she sees sky passing overhead and hears the creaking of the wagon wheels. She feels the warmth of the blanket Jarry’s wrapped her in, and notes, with a brief uptick of interest, that the leaves are full now on the trees. Winking through them, incandescent sunlight vies with inky black to form a filigree. They’re carrying her inside again. Is it the cottage? Addie doesn’t recognize the place, nor, after a vapid attempt, can she much care. There are other people in the room, speaking in hushed tones, but their faces blur. What is that there? Is it an altar? There are many things upon this altar, but what draws her attention is a figurine, a queer, small bust, coal-black, with eyes and nose and lips of cowrie shells. It’s almost silly looking, like a crude statue a child might make of mud. Or like the tar baby…This thought drifts through Addie’s mind, and she closes her eyes.