Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  Here, under a light shed, two enormous copper vats are mounted on brick piers. Under one of them a fire burns, and two slaves—Wando Passo men—are feeding cordwood into it. From a crude chimney, smoke is rising, and from the vat itself, a quivering cloud of steam.

  “We took an old boiler from the sugar mill,” Jarry tells her as he helps her from the boat, “a prototype that Father fabricated years ago, and cut it in half for the evaporating tanks.”

  A wooden trough—like a small, slanted aqueduct, buttressed with posts—extends a hundred yards into the adjoining marsh, where a scaffold, twenty feet high, is built. On this rests a platform with a handle mounted in the center like the I-shaped lever of a railroad trolley car. Addie shades her eyes and points. “What’s that?”

  “There’s a pump in the salt creek,” Jarry says. “At flood tide, when the water is saltiest and the seepage least, we fill the vats and light the fires.”

  “So you boil them down.”

  He nods. “We boil them down and we get this.” Taking a scoop out of the cooling, second vat, he lets it slough into her hand.

  “It’s warm.” Addie smiles and puts her tongue to it. “It’s almost sweet.”

  “I prefer it to store-bought.”

  “However did you think of this?”

  He shrugs, clearly pleased.

  “We’ll have some for our hard-boiled eggs?” She lifts the basket.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Almost. I should like to stretch my legs a little first. How far is the beach?”

  “No more than half a mile.”

  “Would you share a walk and dine with me?”

  He gives the men instructions, and they strike out east.

  “My idea,” he tells her as they walk, “is to take the salt to Mars Bluff with our rice and trade for cotton there.”

  “What do we want cotton for?”

  “We don’t. We’ll run it down to Nassau.”

  “Through the blockade?”

  “Through the blockade. There, the British pay in gold. I’ve spoken to Father’s bankers and advisers, and we all think it’s the best way to proceed.”

  “I leave it in your hands,” she says. “Honestly, Jarry, I don’t know what we’d do…what I would…”

  There’s no need to speak this either. Understanding, Jarry smiles and stares down at the ground, which has turned sandy underfoot. Presently, they hear the boom of surf.

  Addie takes her shoes off as they climb the dune. “I swear, I haven’t seen the ocean in I can’t remember when.”

  On the east side then, in full view of it, they choose a sheltered spot out of the wind, and Addie spreads the cloth and hands across a cup.

  “Coffee is a problem we’ve yet to solve,” he tells her as he pours. “But Mother has devised a substitute from toasted okra seeds. Is there another cup?”

  She checks the basket, shakes her head. “We can both drink from that.”

  She reaches, and he hesitates, then hands the cup to her as he has drunk from it, with the untouched rim toward her. Addie, on an impulse, turns and drinks from the same spot where he has placed his lips. When she looks, his eyes are blurred and hot.

  “See what we have,” she tells him with a thrilling jolt of confidence, and she lays out their simple feast. There are boiled new potatoes, and slices of cold, thick bacon left from breakfast, hoecake and warm buttermilk together with the eggs, and salt so fresh it tastes of woodsmoke from the fire.

  “And look what else…” Swaddled in the folds of cloth is Jarry’s father’s Wordsworth.

  “I thought you found him dull.”

  “I’m hoping you may lift my sights.”

  “Perhaps you overestimate my abilities.”

  Addie laughs. “Is that a slur on them or my intelligence?”

  For once, her swiftness flusters him. “I didn’t mean…”

  His answer peters out, and Addie leaps into the breach. “You never finished telling me the story of this poem.”

  His expression settles. “Didn’t I?”

  She shakes her head, and Jarry looks away. “Where did I leave off?”

  “You said you tried to harm yourself. Percival rescued you. You accused him of Thomas’s death. What did he say?”

  “He told me I was right. Thomas’s blood was on his hands. He said, ‘Hate me, if you wish, but don’t hate life.’ He said that there’s a beauty in humanity that, if I died, I’d lose the opportunity to see. He asked me what I wanted, and I answered, ‘Freedom,’ and he told me, ‘There are two, Jarry, and the first, the one you seek, is the shallower of the pair. I know, because I have it; I own it as my birthright and feel no freer than you. That first freedom is the only one I can give or take from you, but there’s a second, deeper freedom no man can deprive you of, even if he takes your life. I’ve sought it since I was your age, and it eludes me still, but I’ve learned something on the way. I at least know more than you. And I’ll show you where it lies, and how to look for it, and why, but only if you give your word you won’t attempt to take your life again. Will you make that pact with me?’ He held out his hand.”

  “And you took it,” Addie says.

  “I took it.”

  “And then?”

  He picks up the book. “He took this from the shelf and read the poem to me.”

  “Read it to me now,” she whispers.

  Weighing the request, he holds her stare and then begins.

  Closing her eyes, Addie sees the poet walking on the moors. It’s a beautiful morning. The sun is shining after rain. At first, he feels at one with everything. “‘The air is filled with pleasant noise of waters…. The hare is running races in her mirth.’”

  On reencounter, Wordsworth pleases her in a way he never did at school. What struck Addie then as dull seems plain with high intention now. And there’s something in Jarry’s delivery—something quiet, passionate, sure-footed, clear—that’s ravishing to watch, like a fine horse running in a field.

  But then the mood turns….

  “‘But, as it chanceth, from the might

  Of joy in minds that can no further go,

  As high as we have mounted in delight

  In our dejection do we sink as low;

  To me that morning did it happen so….’”

  As Jarry reads, it comes to her that he’s revealing the central moment of his life, and her mood turns as well. For it’s his life. Jarry’s. It’s happening out there. He’s opening to her, revealing the best part of himself, while she cowers in the darkened theater, hiding her worst. And Addie thinks, What if I told him? What if I shattered it? What if the foundation stones were shaken, and I let them shake? What might happen then? Might that finally be it, the beginning of her own true life?

  She doesn’t, though, and as Jarry goes on reading, the poet sees an old man in the distance, staring down into a pool.

  “‘At length, himself unsettling, he the pond

  Stirred with his staff, and fixedly did look

  Upon the muddy water, which he conned

  As if he had been reading in a book….’”

  “Goodness. You’ve made the hair stand on my arms,” Addie comments, rubbing them.

  Jarry meets her gaze. “I felt just the same when Father first read it to me.”

  The poet accosts the old man, and they speak. He’s a leech gatherer, seeking the creatures in the pools to sell. Pleasantries are exchanged. The old man shares a few particulars of his profession. Apart from that, the meeting is entirely commonplace. Yet, by the time they part, the poet’s mood has turned again.

  “‘…when he ended,

  I could have laughed myself to scorn to find

  In that decrepit man so firm a mind.

  “God,” said I, “be my help and stay secure,

  I’ll think of the leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!’”

  “So Percival,” she says when he concludes, “whom you’d run away from, from whom you were estranged…”


  “I hated him.”

  “Percival, whom you hated, read you this…and then?”

  “He asked me what has changed.”

  Addie blinks.

  “What in this encounter has turned the poet’s thoughts from”—Jarry seeks the line—“‘Solitude, pain of heart, distress and poverty,’ back to life?”

  “And what has? Did he explain?”

  “Father explained nothing,” Jarry answers. “He shoved the book into my chest and bade me go and find the answer for myself.”

  “And you did.”

  “I read this poem for two and a half…” He looks away. “Two and a half years. It’s hardly too much to say that it was my whole education. The day I came to him…That day, he said, ‘You are my son. If you’ll work for me, I’ll try to be a father and a friend to you, and I will free you when I die.’” Jarry’s eyes are brimming. He doesn’t try to hide them from her now.

  Slipping beside him, Addie rests her hand on his broad back. “So you came to love him in the end.”

  He looks away over the sea. “He was that old leech gatherer to me.”

  “He loved you, too,” she says. “He told me so before he died. Do you know what he said?”

  Jarry shakes his head.

  “He told me you were his beloved son. He said there was something in himself he was able to give to you without effort, from simple joy, that he could never give to Harlan, however hard he tried, and I see so clearly what it was, and why.”

  “Father didn’t love me,” Jarry says.

  “What?” she asks, surprised. “Of course he did.”

  Jarry shakes his head. “He believed he did. There was a time I thought so, too. Not anymore. If he had, he would have set me free.”

  Jarry’s self-possession has returned. The look that Addie knows, the one she first saw on the dock, has settled in his eyes. They’re like the ocean, serious, comfortless, and deep, and touched with the suggestion of fatigue the waves express when they draw back. “It took me a long time—years—to see,” he says. “Really, it’s only since the funeral, but what Father did, he held out his two hands to me….” He extends his fists and turns one face up and opens it. “In the right was freedom, and in the left was poetry, and he said, ‘This—poetry—is more valuable, and if you will give me that—your freedom—I will give you this.’ And because I was fifteen and didn’t see the gambit for what it was, because he was my father and I wanted to believe, I accepted it.”

  “But, Jarry, I’m sure, in your father’s view, poetry was the most precious gift he had to give, and he shared it with you alone, not Harlan.”

  “I don’t deny its value,” he replies, “but it’s a secondary good. Without the primary one, how much is it really worth? Harlan was able, every day when he got up, to choose his course.”

  “But your father put the operation of the family business in your hands and taught you how to run it. What did Harlan learn—to ride to the hounds and go whoring in French Alley?”

  “If he didn’t put his freedom to constructive uses, he was free nonetheless. If I’d told Father I wished to spend my hours in the library and leave the plantation business to others, do you know what he’d have said? He’d have been shocked and offended, Addie. Father would have felt betrayed by my ingratitude. If I’d persisted, eventually he’d have punished me. I know this as I know the sun will rise tomorrow. And how can that be love? It’s not. That Father felt a positive regard for me, I don’t deny. That there was fondness, affection, respect for my capacities—all this, I concede. But, love, no. For love is never love that regards the beloved in a lesser light or accords him lesser rights than the lover accords himself. Love is never love that oppresses, that grants the beloved lesser freedoms than the lover grants himself.”

  And she is weeping now.

  “But what…?” With surprised tenderness, he touches her shoulder.

  “Do you know, I always feared they didn’t love me either.” She looks at him with streaming eyes.

  “Who?”

  “My parents. They died not two miles south of here.” She points with her right hand. “One day, when I was four months old, an afternoon as calm as this, they walked into this very sea and did not come back. My aunt always said it was an accident, but look…Look there, and tell me how could they have drowned.”

  “You don’t believe they did?”

  She shakes her head. “I never have and never will.”

  “But why…?”

  “Because of me. Because I was burdensome to them.”

  “That can’t be true. I’m sure it’s not.”

  “And I’m just as sure that Percival loved you.”

  Reflected in the mirror of the other, each beholds himself more truly than either has alone. And love is close, so close, for what is it but this, one True Self by another beheld, and, by the power of that beholding, freed to see?

  Addie is more beautiful now than when she was that girl of seventeen, who read “Evangeline” and vowed that she would wait for her own Gabriel no matter what, however long it took. And she has waited after all, despite herself. No man but Jarry has beheld her in this state; none ever will. A door has opened, one that Addie never found at Mme Togno’s school. For each of them, it is as if the world has only been created this last hour and no one else exists in it but them.

  And she must tell him now. Addie knows she must.

  Why doesn’t she? Why, instead, does she allow her head to drop against his shoulder, allow her eyes to close? In this brief, unexpected sweetness, she luxuriates, listening to the waves come in, and Addie vows to tell him on the walk to camp, and yet she doesn’t. Nor on the sail back. She’s grateful for the hissing of the bow wave on the keel, for the drumming of the edge of the taut sail.

  At home again, she accuses her reflection in the mirror as she brushes out her hair. Love is never love that grants the beloved lesser freedom than the lover grants himself. Isn’t that what Jarry said, and isn’t it what she has done? And why?

  The cardinal lights upon the branch, and Addie hears the words as clear as if the dead man spoke them in her ear: “I was afraid that if I freed them, they might leave.”

  I must tell him, Addie thinks. “I must tell him now.” She says the words aloud, and yet she doesn’t rise to go. For shaking the foundations is, after all, a fearful enterprise. She never leaves the room all night, but lies awake and tosses, fretting. She’ll tell him in the morning. “I will,” she vows. “I will.” The necessity has the inevitability of death, and Addie dreads it hardly less. She’s unaware of having slept, but apparently she has, for something startles her and she awakes to find a gray light in the room and, coming through the window, muted by the panes, the sound of screams.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Right, then left, then right again. As he made his getaway, there was a lump in Ransom’s throat, a thickness. Pride. A song was playing in his head: “Street Fighting Man.”

  “Why did you hit him, Daddy?” Hope asked, crying in the back. “Why?”

  The song veered suddenly off-key. In the rearview, he met her streaming eyes.

  “I don’t know, Hope. I shouldn’t have. It was wrong.”

  Oh, bullshit, said the voice.

  “You made him bleed.”

  “I know I did. I’m sorry.”

  What a crock.

  “Why? Daddy, why?”

  He hit the brakes and turned to her with harried eyes. “I was afraid he was going to take you, Hope, okay? That’s why. I shouldn’t have done it. I’m sorry I did. Now, let’s not talk about it anymore.”

  “I want ice keem, Doddy,” Charlie said.

  “I’m going to get you some. But right now, let’s put something on. What do you want?” He shuffled jewel cases on the console like the face cards in a deck. “Here’s Kipper,” he said, dealing, “Dora…The Magic School Bus Blows Its Top—how about that?”

  “I want The Lion King,” said Hope.

  “The Lion King it is.” Ran sho
ved in the disc.

  Why don’t you quit lying to her and yourself, you wuss? the voice proposed as Ran set off again, uncertain where they were. You aren’t sorry. You enjoyed it. Quit pretending to be nice. And you know why you hit him. You didn’t like his pants…his “trousers”—isn’t that what Claire called them that time? Remember when she tried to make you buy a pair?

  “Shut up,” he said halfheartedly, feeling tired, demoralized. As he turned again, the memory assailed him…the prissy little salesclerk in his bow tie and horn-rims, whose handkerchief—which complemented, but subtly differed from, his tie—spilled from his breast pocket in a way that seemed wholly unpremeditated, but which Ransom, on a thousand subsequent attempts, could never quite get right. As they stood before the three-way mirror, in the calculated and revealing light on the sixth floor at Saks, the little man, who seemed so smooth and confident to be a clerk, knelt down and turned the cuff.

  “How much of a break do you prefer?”

  “You better give me all the break you’ve got,” said Ransom, turning embarrassment, as usual, into a joke. Pushing thirty then, he’d never owned a pair of fitted pants…trousers. By that point in the transaction, he was starting to perspire and also to blame Claire—who was thumbing through the rack behind them, blithely unaware—starting, in fact, to hate her just a bit, and then a little more than that, for putting him in the position, for being unaware.