Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  “I am.”

  “One of your men just shot my…” And, oh, it hits her now…Peter, gentle Peter, with his fragole Alpine, Peter with his cymbelines! Bending double, Addie covers her mouth, stifling something half a sob and half a scream. “My gardener. He’s back there killing all our cows! Can you not stop him?”

  “You’d best keep out of the way,” he says, not looking at her now. “You won’t be harmed unless you interfere.”

  “Who are you?” Addie screams. “What is your name? What are you doing with my rice?”

  “James Montgomery. Colonel James Montgomery. Second South Carolina Volunteers. We’re requisitioning it.”

  “Stealing it, you mean? How am I to feed my slaves?”

  “You have no slaves, madam. We’ve come to liberate them.”

  “How, by starving them? Please. Please! I beg you. I have three hundred people here to see to. This is all the bread I have to put into their mouths. This is wrong. I see the guilt of it upon your face.”

  “You see what isn’t there.”

  “Then look at me!” she shouts. “Will you not look at me? Do you not have a mother or a sister? Do you not have a wife? I am a human being, just as they are. Can you not think of them and pity me?”

  And now Montgomery turns on her. “You ask for a consideration you did not extend to whose whom you enslaved. You caused this war, you people here. Do you not know what you are fighting for?”

  “I’m fighting to survive!” she cries. “And for my home!”

  “You fight for your home only in the second instance,” he says, with the cold relish of a rhetorician, who won’t deny himself the pleasure of a righteous victory in argument, even in a scene like this, “because in the first you fought to perpetuate the freedom to oppress. This rice, this barn, this house, this land—all was made or purchased with illegally extorted labor and is forfeit as fruit of the poison tree. And, no, to answer your question, I don’t see you as human like my mother or my wife. You, the Southern slaveowners, brought this on yourselves and all of us, including many of my comrades, who’ve drenched Virginia with their blood and won’t go home to see their mothers or their children or their grieving wives again. If you want pity, ask it of Almighty God. I have none to give.”

  “But can you not leave my Negroes something to eat?”

  “I suggest you feed them beef.”

  With this sober quip, he turns and paces off, his hands still clasped behind his back—like a grim prelate, Addie thinks; then, hearing screams, she runs toward the house. In the library, flames are running up the ivied drapes like orange squirrels up a tree. Addie tears them down and stamps on them. Books are scattered on the floor. The partners desk has been ransacked, the drawers all out and broken. Downstairs, she can hear men shouting angrily and battering the cellar door.

  Another scream. It’s Tenah, from upstairs…. Addie finds her in the bedroom, on her bed, skirts raised, legs forced up around a man, a white staff sergeant, with muttonchops like Harlan used to have and a dimple in his chin so deep it looks as if it’s been indented by a pencil that deposited its lead. His striped trousers at his ankles, he’s humping her with brutal and efficient speed, while Tenah ineffectually beats his chest and bites her lip and weeps. His musket, with the mounted bayonet, leans against the bedpost, and his left fist holds a crocus sack half filled with swag.

  “Get off her!” Addie shouts.

  “Damn you, bitch!” Startled, he withdraws, stumbling over his dropped trousers as he tries to pull them up. “Ain’t you never heard of knocking? I thought y’all was supposed to have such fine manners here.”

  Recovering his confidence, he laughs, swigging from a bottle of Harlan’s good Málaga.

  “Come here,” Addie says, and Tenah, like a cat, is off the bed.

  “Hold on, now, we ain’t finished here.”

  “Tenah, go downstairs.”

  The sergeant smiles and shakes his head. “You ain’t real obedient, are you, dear.”

  Noticing the sterling lady’s set, he tries to put the brush into his sack, but fails to open it with both hands full. “Get over here and help.” He gestures loosely with the gun.

  “What’s this?” With his little finger, he fishes Addie’s mother’s pearls out of a dish. “These’ll look all right on my old woman, don’t you guess?”

  When Addie makes a grab, the string breaks and they ping on the floor and roll away in all directions.

  “Pick ’em up,” the sergeant says, in the tone of a reasonable man proffering a reasonable request.

  “I won’t.”

  He holds her stare, smiling as he takes her measure. “Put that mirror in my bag.” He nods to the dressing table.

  Addie picks it up and smashes it on the chair.

  The punch is so hard and swift she feels her jaw unhinge, and she is lying on the floor, feeling stunned and thick. She tries to rise, but it’s as if her limbs are bound with tiny threads, like Gulliver. She thinks about the spirit pressing down on her in bed…. But that was just a dream. A dream…Is this?

  The man is on her now, ripping at her clothes, her white and purple dress. She feels his calloused hand on her bare breast and smells his breath, sweet wine and throw-up.

  “What is it you think to get?” she whispers in his tufted ear. “What is it you think to get by this?”

  “Shut up,” he says calmly, punching her again. “Just shut up, bitch, and spread your legs.”

  He’s in her now, and Addie turns her head away. On her face, her frown is carved as deeply as a mask’s. She feels a pang of grief and pity, the sort you feel for someone else. There’s a patch of sunlight on the floor, a slanted rectangle, warm and yellow, rich. It’s just beyond her fingertips, and in that light, a pearl. She thinks about it, warm against her mother’s skin the day she walked into the sea. There’s radiance upon the top of it, and down below it casts a shadow on itself. A brilliant, checkered thing that casts a shadow on itself…That’s what human beings are. This is the thought in Addie’s mind. She’s gone into a dream, and in this dream, she hears a voice she knows.

  “Get off,” it says.

  “Nigger, wait your turn.”

  Now the rifle butt comes down, and the sergeant with the dimple in his chin rolls off with a deep groan.

  And now, in Addie’s dream, it’s Jarry looking down at her. His face is large and soft.

  “Is it you?” she whispers.

  “I looked everywhere for you,” he says. “I tried to stop it. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  Reaching to cover herself, her hands can’t manage it. She flushes hot with shame, and he averts his eyes.

  “I should not have left.” Squatting on his hams, Jarry lurches forward, then sideways.

  “Jarry, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  Falling over on his seat, he looks down at his breast, and something presses up his coat, like a finger working underneath, and then the blood begins to spread.

  “That’ll teach you, nig.” On his knees, the sergeant withdraws the bayonet with a wet sissh.

  Jarry fumbles for his sidearm, but his right arm flops. He looks at Addie with such grief and such apology; then there’s a roar. The sergeant flies back against the wall, and there is Tenah with the Purdey in the door.

  Jarry sits against the bedpost, with his hand over his breast like a boy making a pledge.

  “Jarry?”

  He opens his eyes and looks at her. There’s a wet gurgling as he pants, like someone with the croup.

  “Miss, the Rebs is in the yard,” says Tenah.

  “Quick, get some of Harlan’s things.”

  There are shouts below, and gunfire, as they change Jarry’s pants and shirt. Footsteps on the stair, and Jules Poinsett walks in with a LeMat revolver in his hand.

  “They said there was one up here.”

  “There he lies,” says Addie, nodding to the dead man.

  “And who’s this?”

  “My steward, Jarry.”

/>   Poinsett frowns at her and then at Tenah. “Come now, it’s well known hereabouts your steward ran off years ago and sided with the Yanks.”

  “He saved my life, Jules. Please. Are you not tired of death?”

  Poinsett stares at her with a severe and monumental frown, as if making up his mind. “Your name meant something in this country once,” he says, and walks out of the door.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Ran’s knife, put down too hard, clanked on his plate. “So, what’s the plan?” he asked the others, whose chicken lay, like his, wounded, if at all, only in a polite, pro forma way. “Are we going to sit here looking glum all night, or does anybody want to hear my song?” He looked at Claire, but she declined to leap into the breach.

  “I’d love to hear it,” Shanté said.

  Ran turned to Cell.

  “Why not?” the big man said. “Let’s hear your song.”

  In the library, he took his vintage Gibson from the thicker case. A J-45 from 1946, it had been purchased long ago in Nashville on the strip and had another life before it came to him, a life that Ransom sometimes, catching fire, fancied he could channel through the strings. With its top of proudly pick-scarred sitka spruce, its mahogany sides, the mother-of-pearl bridge dots on its rosewood frets, it was the first truly fine guitar he’d ever owned, the one he held on to through the years as a dozen others came and went, the one he still loved best. If the electric in the thinner case—a 1960 Les Paul ’Burst—was Ransom’s mistress, the old acoustic was the one Claire meant when she called it—half joking…but only half—“the wife.”

  Slipping his pick from between the strings, he turns a nickel peg or two, correcting tune, and plays the first few bars experimentally. Even in his mind, Ran has yet to hear the song this way, unplugged, and has to find the stresses, reinvent the slower rhythm as he goes. After a moment, he puts the pick away and begins to finger in a style he learned from the greatest blues picker of them all, Mississippi John Hurt, whom Ransom, in his youth, paid homage to as devotedly as ever did Palero to the muerto in his pot. The old black man gave him master lessons from beyond, and it is to this heritage, this devotion, that Ransom reaches back tonight, and underneath the madcap surface, his song reveals a sadder, unexpected undertone, a blue-lit gloom like undersea, as Ransom sings:

  “In the submarine of creation Captain Nemo

  can be found kicking ass and taking names.

  I ought to know ’cause he impressed me deeply

  and I attended boot camp in his brains.

  It never rains down here; there isn’t any weather.

  On maneuvers, blind fish osculate our masks.

  I’d like to know their taxonomic listings,

  but I fear Nemo would torpedo if I asked.

  It’s not that he’s a tyrant or a monster—

  in fact, he’s like a father to us all.

  It’s just that loneliness has made his heart ferocious,

  and he’s grown deaf to any softer call.

  When it began, nobody can remember.

  No doubt at the beginning: one fine day

  the surface world collapsed around his longing,

  the deep world yawned and took his life away.

  And he dove after it with righteous passion,

  But after twenty years he knew it wasn’t there.

  Then he stopped caring and a change came over him:

  he learned to breathe the sunless element like air.”

  Under the high ceilings, amid the walls of books, Ransom holds the room, reminding each of them what they all know and frequently forget, that sadness, slightly lifted, slightly shaped, is at the heart of every beauty, and loss the central subject of all art. He speaks both for the living, who are present, and for the dead, those who sat here once—who loved their lives as fervently as these do here tonight, found it as inconceivable that they might end—and they are gone. And is it any truer, is it more plausible, to say that it is intuition, something in himself that Ransom owns, than spirit voices, beings outside Ran and greater than himself, that lift him now and whisper in his ear the next verse of his song?

  “And though we know he’s mad, we don’t desert him.

  For in a way, he’s better than the rest.

  For he held fast in his unhappiness

  To the injustice we forgave so we could rest.”

  However it may be, from whatever source it comes, it comes. And after all the madness of these last days, it’s strange how relaxed Ran is right now, how calm, how settled in his stance. Like a marlin that’s thrashed on deck and been released, he whisks his tail and vanishes into the deep. And each of them—Shanté, Cell, and Claire, especially Claire—listens with bittersweet emotion, weighing the gift that Ransom has in him against the troubled man he is.

  When he’s done, he lifts his head. Having done this many, many times over many, many years, Ransom isn’t unaware of what their silence means. The expression on his face is that of someone who believes he’s finally loved, when he’s long since given up the hope of it.

  “Best song you ever wrote,” said Marcel Jones, the first to speak. “I have one small criticism, though….”

  Ransom blinked. “Lay it on me.”

  “‘Osculate’?”

  Ran weighed it for a moment, then laughed out loud and slapped both knees. “I knew you were going to say that! Eighteen years, and I damn well knew you’d give me shit for ‘osculate’!”

  “I mean, how much would you really lose with ‘kiss’?”

  “You’re right! You’re absolutely right!” Ran laid the Gibson tenderly back in its case. “It’s that poor-boy part of me, Marcel, the one who never finished high school. He still has to show the world he has a passable vocabulary.”

  “You proved it long ago,” said Claire.

  “That proving thing, though, Claire…,” Ran said, and the softness in his face was gone. “Is it ever really finished?” When she didn’t answer, he flipped the lid closed with his toe. “You don’t like it.”

  “I think it’s strange and strong,” she said. “There’s a wildness in it I haven’t heard from you in years.”

  His heart, that quick, was in his throat. “But—”

  She shook her head. “No but. I was just thinking…For someone who has so much self-awareness, you can be so fucking blind, so blinded by yourself.”

  “And that makes me different from anybody in this room?”

  “Yes, it does,” she answered, clear. “And there’s a side of that that’s good, and another side that’s very hard to live with.”

  And now, around them in the room, the silence falls like rain.

  “I’ve caused some damage, Claire,” he said, “I know I have, but, sitting here—me here, you there, face-to-face—I have to wonder if the person you see in the mirror can tell herself that she’s caused any less. I don’t see much difference.”

  “That would be my point.”

  Claire looked at him with the expression Ran remembered from his first night back, gazing in the lighted window from the yard, when he could tell she couldn’t see him through her own reflection in the glass. Her solemnity was that of someone who has no sense of humor left, who’s lost the ability or will to smile at pleasantries, to engage in small talk, to gladly suffer fools, someone who no longer cares to save for rainy days or mind her p’s and q’s, someone for whom the world has become a profoundly serious place. She was as beautiful as Ran had ever seen her, but like a solemn angel God had sent in wrath. This was the secret Claire, the one Ran feared the most and had wooed hardest, tried the hardest to appease. Her judgment, falling in his favor once, had saved him, he believed. Were it to fall against him now, Ran didn’t know who, on the other side of judgment, he would be, what piece of him, if any, would be left.

  “Listen, I’ve been thinking…” He flicked the case-lock shut. “It’s a little late in the day, I know, but I’ve been going through this, and I think Cell should have a cut of the song royalties.”

/>   “How about me?” Claire fired back. There was no hesitation. Not a trace.

  Ran smiled, hoping he was supposed to, knowing, deep down, he was not. “It’s sort of the same thing, Claire, isn’t it?” he said. “What’s in my pot—so to speak—is in your pot, too.”

  She started to retort, but Ransom cut her off before she could. “But okay, okay, whatever, you, too. You guys tell me what you think is fair.”

  “How about fifty percent for you,” Claire said, “twenty-five apiece for Cell and me.”

  Ran smiled, but it was slow to come. “Gee, Claire,” he said, carefully modulating his tone, “from the point of view of strict equity, that seems a little steep.”

  “All right,” she rejoined, “‘from the point of view of strict equity,’ what do you consider fair?”

  “Something more along the lines of ninety percent for me, the two of you split ten.”

  Claire smiled bitterly. “You think it would be number one if the title was ‘Talk Is Cheap’?”

  “How about something in between?” Shanté put in. “Ran says ninety, you say fifty. How about seventy-fifteen-fifteen?”

  “That’s way too much.” Having set out to be generous, Ran felt the old resistance rising now.

  “I think it’s not enough,” Claire said. “You wouldn’t even have retained mechanicals if I hadn’t put Gruber’s feet to the fire.”

  “That’s true,” said Ran. “You negotiated that. Why don’t you take twenty, Cell gets ten.”

  “Sixty-forty.”

  “Actually, guys,” Cell said, “I don’t want anything.”

  “He’ll take it, though.” Claire kept her eyes fixed on Ransom’s as she put her hand on Marcel’s arm. Ran stared at it, Claire’s hand, pale, on Cell’s black arm, and he could feel it like a brand searing his own skin. His vision blurred. He went away. For a moment, he did not know where he was or who he is. When he came back, he said, “Why don’t you just take it all?”