Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  Ran squatted on his hams. “Sure,” he said, “he’s white, with a black patch on one eye and ears that fold down at the tops. He’s attending to His Master’s Voice.”

  “No,” Hope said, impatient with the joke, “he’s black, Daddy. All black. And he’s hungry.”

  “Maybe we should feed him.”

  “I don’t know what he wants.”

  Ran stared into his daughter’s grave and slightly worried eyes and glimpsed the sunken anger there.

  “Well, take him in the house,” Claire intervened as Daddy’s smile died on the vine. “We’re going to have an early bath.”

  As Hope moved off, Ran looked at Claire as if to say, What’s this? But Claire, this time, did not look back.

  “What’s that?” she asked instead, taking in the Odyssey.

  “I bought you a new car,” Ran said.

  Claire looked some more, then gazed around the group to see if someone might explain the joke. Her eyes arrived, at last, on him.

  “It got a little beat-up in the accident,” he conceded, “but the body shop can fix that up. It has a DVD.”

  “Did it come with a handful of magic beans as well?”

  In the beat before he found his answer, a surge of rage and grief shot through him, wild and deep, like the first jolt of the electric chair. Never fucking good enough… “No,” he said, turning from the precipice, “but I did get five free movies.”

  Claire’s expression turned perplexed.

  “I sold my father’s Thunderbird to get you this,” he said, aware it sounded childish even as he spoke, but unable to resist. “But no big deal.”

  “And you expect my thanks….”

  “That would be asking a bit much.”

  She stared at him and then at Cell. It was a look that Ran knew well, as if to say her prophecy had been fulfilled. The expression was one she’d heretofore reserved for him.

  “I’m fine, by the way.”

  Claire’s look turned forthright now, and it dawned on Ran that this was all he was going to get. “Are you?”

  “Nothing to worry about,” he said. “Just a lot of pain, is all.” The quote was Henry Fonda—On Golden Pond. In days gone by, they’d watched that movie many times, eating popcorn, holding hands, passing back and forth the Kleenex box. They’d seen themselves, their fretted love, in it and thought—or Ransom had—they’d end up old like Kate and Hank, and Ran, the first to go, would meet his maker staring into these crème caramel eyes which would have forgiven him—surely would have done by then—for the burn he more than anyone had helped to put in them.

  There was no forgiveness in them now. If the allusion to the movie registered, Claire gave no indication.

  And Ransom had to contemplate the possibility that Claire might not be there to grieve him when he went, that he might be denied the consolation of knowing he’d been wholly loved one time, one time at least, by one other human being on this earth, even if he couldn’t love himself. And was that—being loved once in this life—just another sentimental dream of youth, like playing Shea and Fillmore East? Where, finally, do you make your stand? And is there any bedrock in this world? Ran was getting down to that point now, down to bedrock, down through flesh to bone and wholly unprepared to yield his point. He’d begun to contemplate the sanctity of vows…. In sickness and in health, for better and for worse… Deep inside, something he’d always felt, felt as long as he remembered, felt as long as he could stand—then ceased to feel, or ceased to know he felt—began to stir toward consciousness again. And it was like the coils of a great snake thrashing awake after a long sleep, like a seismic tremor, like the trembling in the rails you feel before you see the train…. Then suddenly there it is, barreling toward the crowded station, no sign of slowing down….

  Then Claire reached out and lifted up his hair. Her gaze was clinical, nurselike, but at her touch, every joint in Ransom’s body turned to liquid.

  “Okay,” he said, feeling something in his chest, hope or panic, he couldn’t tell. “Okay,” he said, panting slightly, “so it isn’t going to be The Big Chill. We can still be grown-ups, can’t we? I think we can manage that at least.”

  “Who wants a drink?” said Claire, with foxhole gaiety, driving home another long, sweet nail.

  “Excellent idea,” he said. “Let’s drink some alcohol and burn some meat. What say we fry a chicken? I’ve still got a hankering for that.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a glass of wine,” said Shanté with a look of hard compassion toward them both. “But before we get too far into the night, I’d like to see that pot.”

  FORTY-NINE

  September…The last water, roiled white and stirred with chaff, mingles with the river’s brown. John drops the counterweight and shuts the gate, and on it flows, one thing. It’s harvest now, and down the rows they wend, bending over, with their sickles, the small, curved knives called reap-hooks here, cutting always toward themselves, laying the gold heads on the stubble, singing in slow cadence as they go:

  In case I never see you anymo’…

  Where they cut yesterday, the women gather up the sheaves and bind them with a wisp of rice, leaving small cocks in the field to dry until tomorrow, when they’ll tote them to the flats. And Addie comes behind them with the children, last of all and singing, too, gleaning unhulled grains out of the mud. She has an apronful and she’s perspiring, though the sky has lifted off and there’s a difference in the light today. When she climbs the dike, a puff of wind blows back her hair and catches in her dress as in a sail. The sun is striking off the water, and Addie smiles and closes her eyes, feeling its reflected warmth. The goodness of life, she thinks, is mostly little things like this, a breeze as soft as a caress, September light, an apronful of rice.

  When she opens them again, Jules Poinsett is standing on the piazza in his uniform, one arm behind his back, the other sleeve folded up and pinned. Below him in the drive, Peter holds his saddled horse. Jules is gazing straight at her, and Addie, across the distance, knows from this…She’s been expecting this visit for some time now, truly, since that night in Charleston, when Harlan spoke about the blue cloud swirling over him, and Addie gazed into his face and seemed to see its shadow there and knew him marked. Once upon a time, the girl she was, or thought herself to be, would have released the corners of her apron and allowed the rice to spill, unheeded, on the ground, but she resists this now and carefully puts her contribution in the fanner with the others’, then wipes her hands and calls Tim to pole her back.

  “Jules,” she says, holding out her hand, forgetful briefly.

  He takes it with his left. “Mrs. DeLay,” he says, not Addie, yet there’s something personal in the pressure he exerts that makes her know he is no stranger to his task.

  She sits in the rocking chair, leaning forward slightly, erect, and folds her hands.

  “It’s my sad duty…,” he begins, and though Addie expects the news and feels herself prepared, she flies away, some part of her, for a time, however long or brief. She becomes aware of the dappled sunlight falling through the old trees in the park, the softness of the air, the September sky with the great ships of cloud that come back every fall. I never loved him, Addie thinks, watching as they sail away. How sad…how sad that is….

  “In the evacuation…,” Jules is telling her when she comes back.

  “The evacuation…”

  “Of Wagner, Addie, yes, the night before last. The order came from Charleston. Motte…You know my cousin, Motte, I think….”

  “Yes, slightly.”

  “He was able to secure the steamer, Sumter, to assist in taking off the men. They were primarily of the Twentieth South Carolina and the Twenty-third Georgia, and it was after dark to avoid the Union guns. Captain DeLay volunteered to remain to spike the howitzers. It was dangerous duty. Their sappers, by then, were no more than forty feet outside our ditch, and would’ve swiftly overrun the fort had they suspected our retreat. The garrison marched up the beach in silence,
without light, to Battery Gregg, where the transports took them off. I don’t know a great deal more. Captain DeLay was in the final group to board. Motte saw him in the stern, looking back over the rail as the shells arced down on Wagner from the fleet. He asked me to tell you that. Motte then went forward to the pilothouse, and Harlan—Captain DeLay—wasn’t seen again. They were almost at Sumter, perhaps a half mile off, when there came a flash from Sullivan’s. Motte first thought it was a signal flare, and then here came the ball, he said, skipping through the waves and raising streaks of spray. The first shot missed, but then the whole battery opened up. The boat took several fatal hits and rapidly began to sink. There was great confusion, men shouting, running, stripping down to jump into the sea…. It’s shoal there, no more than shoulder deep, but the tide was running hard to sea. Those who were able waded off to get out of the fire. After fifteen or twenty rounds, the gunners at Moultrie realized their mistake and held fire, but the garrison was stranded there all night in the sea. At dawn, as they were being carried off in boats, they came under Federal fire. Captain DeLay was not among their number when they mustered at the fort.”

  “What happened? Where…”

  “I wish I had an answer. The truth is, we don’t know. The stern quarter took a direct hit from the Parrott guns. That’s where Motte last saw your husband. It’s his belief that Captain DeLay was killed by that shell. He was never seen after they entered the water.”

  “Could he not have swum…”

  “Some did. Sumter was the nearest point of land, but Captain DeLay wasn’t with them, nor was he seen. I know how tempting it can be, Addie, when there’s any thread of hope, to cling, but it’s Motte’s belief and Colonel Graham’s, as well as mine, that Harlan perished. The overwhelming likelihood is that he was killed instantly, and though it’s no comfort to you now, I believe in time you’ll come to see that a swift death is merciful. A brave mission successfully accomplished, the hope of coming home, of seeing you and Wando Passo once again—he had this, I expect, before his mind, as his last thought. That’s as good a death as any man can have.”

  “But to be killed by his own guns!”

  Now Poinsett frowns. “It was a mistake.”

  “A mistake!”

  “Would that these things never happened, but in war they do. The gunners at the fort saw a boat proceeding through the harbor without lights and fired, according to their standing orders. Those men at Moultrie knew him, Addie, they were Harlan’s friends, many of the Twenty-first. I know they would do anything to call back those shells.”

  “But they can’t.”

  “No, they can’t.”

  But it can’t be, she thinks, surely life can’t be as tenuous, as fragile, as contingent upon accident as this. And then, as Jules stands up to take his leave, a momentary panic overtakes her. Oh, don’t go, she thinks. What do I do now? Tell me what to do! And then she stares into his eyes, which have the same look she saw in Harlan’s at the Mills House in July, when she last saw him—the last time!—the look of one who has beheld a secret he must keep from you and for you, but Addie knows the secret, too: that it’s possible, and not only possible, but easy, to die without ever having lived. The thought of Percival is so strongly with her now…. “I searched through all these books, and never found an answer….” And this is what she wants from Jules right now: for him to tell her how to live, and she looks into his face and thinks, Poor man, you know no more than I….

  “And what will happen now?” she asks. “Will Charleston fall?”

  “We’ll hold out as long as we can. Our best hope now, I think, is that the peace party at the North may prevail in the election and sweep Lincoln and his minions out of power. Then, perhaps, we can make an honorable peace and have our independence.”

  “Personally, I shall pray for swift defeat.”

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. DeLay,” he answers, coolly, standing up. “I have other duty to perform.”

  Ah, thinks Addie, who?

  “Thank you for informing me,” she says, like someone speaking rote lines from a play that she lost interest in long ago.

  And Jules is gone, and the air, the lifted sky, the ships of cloud, the September light—this no longer comforts her. It’s like the air at the summit of some high peak, and it’s strange, having never loved her husband, how hard it is, for the next thirty minutes or an hour, for her to breathe that thin, cold air and want to live. Strange, too, how swiftly Addie’s done with grief.

  I must tell Clarisse, she thinks. Resistance boils up in her heart, but breeding overcomes it, and this is the best part of what she learned in Mme Togno’s school and at Blanche’s knee: that, however hard it is, you must never cease to be a human being.

  In the barren, under pines, on the soft straw before the cottage, a quilt is spread, and on the quilt, a child of one sits and plays alone. It’s the first time she’s seen the boy, and Addie, at a distance, stops and watches as he puts a block atop another and knocks both down and makes a crowing noise and claps his hands. Pleased with his success, he looks up at her with Percival’s and Jarry’s hazel eyes and the full, bee-stung, almost sybaritic lips that Addie only realizes in this moment Harlan and Clarisse both share. Both shared. His dark hair forms a cropped cap on his head, and he is neither black nor white, but somehow both and neither, and finally just himself. His expression sobers when he sees a stranger near, but he seems curious and without fear, and Addie becomes aware of a constriction in her chest, a hammering under her left ear, and then Clarisse is there—in her same white and purple calico—to sweep the child onto her hip and turn, as though to interpose herself between him and a threat.

  And what was that brief constriction in her chest? What did Addie feel? Whatever it was, it’s faded now. Her expression, like Clarisse’s, hardens with dislike.

  “They’ve just come to tell me Harlan’s dead.”

  Clarisse’s dark eyes smolder. She makes no reply.

  “He was killed in the retreat from Wagner—possibly by an exploding shell, or else he drowned. That’s all I know.”

  Addie waits for a response, but it is only a fraction of a second before she knows there will be none. She starts to walk away and then turns back. “What is his name?”

  “James.”

  “James…”

  “He is Harlan’s son.”

  Addie briefly holds her stare, then turns her back and goes.

  “He’s Harlan’s son!” Clarisse shouts after her.

  The shout fades. Now there’s nothing but the sound of Addie’s soft tread through the pines.

  The effort this has cost steals on her suddenly. Realizing how tightly something in her core is clenched, she tries to breathe and let it go. She leans against a tree and drops her head, and then she sees her hand, so pale and soft against the ridged, dark bark, and they seem part of the same thing. She looks around. She’s at the water meadow now. Was this the place? Then it was spring, now it’s fall, but there are tender ferns along the ground, and cardinal flowers, and looking down she sees the vine, the partridgeberry Jarry said the old people call lovers’ vine. Then, it was covered with white flowers with the scent of orange blossoms. Now, they’ve succeeded to the fruit. Mixed among the deep green leaves are scarlet berries, like pendant drops of blood. Lifting one, she sees the eyes, two of them, where the small flowers were that dropped and died. Something is upon her now, some lifted sense, and Harlan is clear before her mind, not as she knew him, but as he was on that first afternoon, frowning and blushing in the hall beside Clarisse, when the spiritual beauty of one in mortal pain shone in his face. That is who you were, she thinks, a man I glimpsed just once and barely knew. I loved you not, yet we were bound by marriage, history, class, a heavy iron chain, and what does it mean now? Oh, Harlan. You wanted to reform your life through me and failed against the odds you faced. I wronged you in marrying without love, and you wronged me. In the end, wrong balanced wrong, and you are gone, and I am free, and I have had the better of our fr
ay.

  Something is upon her now, some high and lifted sense, and she thinks, God has answered after all. He has answered me. His justice, which we trusted to protect the South, has defeated us instead. Everything we believed was wrong, and nothing, no one, was more wrong than I. Oh, Jarry. Jarry. I took my husband’s side against you. I was given such a gift and felt I had no right to it. I know what Percival meant now, for I, too, have missed my fate. What bound me to you was a breath, a golden breath, a vapor, and I chose the chain instead, against my heart’s true cry and what I knew was right. I chose against myself. And that is why you left me, is it not? Is it not?

  She looks up at the canopies of the old trees that seem to have a grace and wisdom that surpass human understanding, then down into the water at her feet, where she sees her own reflection against a silhouette of bright blue sky.

  And now the words come back….

  At length, himself unsettling, he the pool

  Stirred with his staff and fixedly did look

  Upon the muddy water which he conned

  As if he had been reading in a book….

  And what has turned the poet’s thoughts to life away from death? As though a ghostly hand has brushed her back, the small hairs rise on Addie’s spine. I looked into the pool and saw myself, she thinks; then, stepping in, she doesn’t drown, she breaks her image up.

  FIFTY

  Claire handed Shanté the Mini Maglite from the cluttered necessaries drawer, and Shanté turned the beam into the pot, which was keeping vigil on the sideboard as before.

  “So, what,” said Ran over his shoulder, floating the first breast into the lake of burning oil. “A wash pot, right? For cooking black-eyed peas?”

  “Did you see what’s in the bottom?”

  She stood aside and handed him the light. There, outlined in fresh new rust, was a faint design: a cross within a circle and several smaller marks scratched with a chisel or a nail.