Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  “No,” Claire said. “You don’t get to go there anymore with me. You say you want to be grown-ups. This is what grown-ups do. Sixty-five for you; for us, seventeen point-five apiece.”

  She held out her hand, and Ransom stared at it. “How much for ‘kiss’?”

  “Ask Cell. He came up with it.”

  Ran looked at Cell, and Cell looked back with grave, deep eyes, and just said, “‘Kiss’ is free.”

  “Ho, shit…” Reclining in his chair, Ran pushed his hair back with both hands. “Where is this all going, guys? I have a real bad feeling. Where is this supposed to end?”

  No one answered.

  “Daddy?”

  They all turned and there was Hope, in cat pajamas, halfway down the stairs. “I’m scared, Daddy,” she said. “Will you read a book to me?”

  Ransom, with a flight of desperation in his eyes, looked at Claire, at Hope, and back at Claire again.

  “Can you handle it?” Claire asked.

  He took his daughter in his arms and started up the stairs.

  FIFTY-THREE

  In the kitchen, as they cleaned the plates, Claire cut the water off and turned. “Go ahead and say it, Shan.”

  “You’re a grown woman, Claire. You don’t need advice from me. Ransom is a pain, and life is short.”

  “All true.”

  “I’ll be on the porch,” said Cell.

  Claire looked at him, but that was all, so he just went.

  “Anything I tell you,” Shanté said, “is probably something you’ve already told yourself….”

  “No doubt. But?”

  Shanté laid the flatware in a tangled heap. “Okay, what worries me? And this isn’t about Ransom, Claire…. Right now, I’m thinking about you and Hope and Charlie and your family, all right?”

  “What worries you is…,” Claire prompted with a stony face.

  “I don’t know exactly what you’re feeling, but I can form an educated guess. I’ve seen it many times, Claire, I’ve been in the same place myself….”

  “Go on.”

  “You start out at a pitch so high you think no one else can grasp your feelings. You’ve stepped through a magic door and found a love that no one else has ever felt before on earth. And maybe it’s true. Maybe once or twice in a thousand or a million times those feelings last, and maybe you and Cell are among the blessed. But speaking for me personally, Claire? I’ve rarely seen it play out that way. In fact, I’ve never seen it once. What I’ve seen is people flying, who crash and fall back, burning, to the ground. I’ve seen the white heat pass into mere warmth. And the light, the brilliant light, Claire, gathers shadows. Sometimes it takes a year, sometimes two, but chances are, you won’t die at the peak like Juliet and Romeo. You’ll come back down. Most people do. Then they find themselves where you and Ran are now, with ‘issues,’ in a different marriage to a different person identical to the marriages they left. For most people, Claire, this kind of passion is a dream they wake up from. And when you do, after that year or two, your children will look at you with something broken in them, honey, something you won’t live long enough to ever put back right. Your life and theirs will be in pieces, and you’ll have wounded the larger Self you truly are, which is not just you, Claire. I don’t mean to preach, but there’s your ego—it’s not a dirty word, and I don’t mean it in that way…. It has legitimate needs you have a legitimate right to seek, but your Self, Claire, your Self is something larger. It includes your children and your family and tribe and your community, and it includes your husband, too. And if you act against that, Claire, if you wound it, my worry is, you’ll be diminished, too.”

  “So you can never leave,” Claire said.

  Shanté went to her and took her hands. Still holding them, they sat down at the table face-to-face. “People can and do, but the results are always mixed, baby, mixed at best. More generally, they’re fucked up. Listen, Claire, I’ve known you a long time. I know your heart is good and that you’re doing what you think is right. But there’s one more thing I want to tell you. There’s an image in Jung somewhere. It may not mean anything to you, but it’s meant a lot to me, and what it is is Jesus on the cross. Jung says the deeper meaning of the crucifixion is that it represents the ego on the tree of Self. It’s nailed up there and stretched and racked, and the purpose of that suffering is to make it grow, to make the ego grow to accommodate the larger thing that’s underneath, the larger thing we are, and that’s what human life is, Claire. That is human life on earth. Try to escape it, try to climb back down, you shirk your fate and end up queer and smaller than you should have been.”

  “What if it’s my Self, though, Shan?” Claire said. “What if it’s my Self that’s on the tree?”

  Shanté gave a sober blink. “Well, baby, that’s another matter, then.

  That’s a wholly different thing. But, Claire, don’t make him lose the children, too. Because, if you do…”

  “If I do, then what? You see where he is. What am I supposed to do?”

  Shanté shook her head. “I just don’t know what will be left to hold him to the ground. I really don’t.”

  Claire started to reply, but there in the doorway, like a spirit, suddenly was Ran.

  “I think you’d better come upstairs,” he said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Both of you,” he said.

  In the bedroom, Hope was sitting against her headboard’s painted scene: a little girl in yellow mud boots chasing down a windblown kite. Her face was bright, excited. There was a disturbing avidity in her expression that was not like any four-year-old’s. “I know what it wants,” she said.

  “What what wants, Hope?” Claire asked, sitting on the bed.

  “The little animal that lives inside me,” she replied with her bright face.

  “Do you mean your dog?”

  “I don’t know, Mommy. I can’t see it anymore.”

  Claire closed her daughter—softly, calmly, firmly—in her arms. “What does it want?”

  “Meat and grapes,” Hope said. “It wants to drink my blood, and when I die it will leave my body. Sometimes it bites me, but it doesn’t mean to, it doesn’t know it’s me.”

  Ran stood beside the bed with the expression people wear in waiting rooms.

  “And do you talk to it?” Claire said.

  “No, I can’t see it.”

  “Does it talk to you?” Shanté asked.

  “No, it can’t see me. But I hear it singing sometimes.”

  “What does it sing?” said Shan.

  “Rarrr-rarr-rarrr,” Hope answered, “rarr-ruh-rarr-rarr-rarr…”

  Claire held her tighter in her arms. “It’s going to be all right.”

  “Will you sleep with me tonight?”

  “Yes, sweetie, Mommy will stay. I have to talk to Daddy first.”

  “Leave it on, Daddy, okay?” Hope said as Ran reached for the light.

  “Okay.” He brushed her hair back from her forehead and planted a kiss there.

  “What happened?” Claire asked, in the hall.

  “I don’t know,” Ran said. “We were just reading.”

  “I didn’t tell you this before,” Shan said. “But in prendas of Zarabanda, the muerto always receives an animal helper…. A black dog.”

  Ran and Claire both stared at her, and then Claire said, “Excuse us, Shan, I need to speak to Ran.”

  “Listen,” she said as soon as Shan was gone, “I’ve had as much of this as I can stand. I’m going to take the kids and leave tonight.”

  “And go where?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “To a hotel, I guess. I don’t want them exposed to this any further.”

  “But they’ve already been exposed. Did you see what just happened?” He pointed to Hope’s door.

  “What are you saying, Ransom? That our daughter is possessed?”

  “I don’t know, Claire,” he replied. “I only know all this is coming from the pot, and we have to put our fa
ith in Shan to tell us what to do.”

  “Bullshit, Ran. I don’t think the pot has anything to do with anything. And there is no ‘us.’ There’s only you. If anything is causing this, it’s you, that’s who: you, Ransom. You’re higher than a kite, and I’m, frankly, scared of you, and scared for Hope and Charlie, too.”

  He gripped her arm. “You think I’d ever hurt you? You think I’d ever hurt our kids?”

  “Let go of me,” she said.

  He did. “Okay. Go, then, Claire. By all means, go. Teach them their dad’s a dangerous lunatic they need to be protected from. Teach them his friends of color—your friend, too—who practices a religion different from the one they taught you at St. Michael’s is a freak to be avoided at all costs. They may as well start learning the important lessons early.”

  “You think they don’t already know? Their hearts are broken, Ran. You broke them. You, with all your craziness.”

  “You bitch,” he said, and tears were running down his cheeks. “It’s not just me. We’re all involved in this. Every goddamn one of us, including Cell and Shan. After everything we’ve been through, you can’t do this one thing for me?”

  “What, Ransom? What one thing?”

  “Stay and see this through.”

  She was clearly torn. “If I stay, Cell does, too.”

  “Where?” asked Ransom. “Where does Cell stay, Claire?”

  She hesitated, and her face was firm. “He can stay downstairs in the guest room.”

  “Are you sure? You don’t want to put me there, and have him here upstairs in the master bedroom?”

  “Ransom…” Her expression softened. She put her hand on his arm now. “Ransom, listen…”

  “Are you fucking him?” he said. “Because if you are, Claire, if you are…” He held his finger in her face, and Claire stood like a deer gazing up into the crosshairs.

  “Then what?” Her voice was soft.

  Ransom turned away and didn’t walk toward the stairs. He ran.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  The winter of 1864 is bleak and some say biblical throughout the South. In Charleston, where once there were gay Secession balls and suppers, a Secession something somewhere every night, there are consolation parties now, where people drink and sing the Psalms till dawn, and women there, formerly considered proper, are fast like no place else.

  But for Addie, at Wando Passo, it is during this time—as Jarry slowly convalesces from his punctured lung, as he lies in Percival’s old place, on Percival’s old chaise, and listens to her read until he falls asleep (they are on “The Prelude” now, having come, unspokenly, upon this common ground, which is, to them, a kind of Psalm)…It’s now that Addie has the thought she sometimes whispers to herself, but never speaks aloud: My true life has begun. And why does she not speak? Perhaps because it is with him, her dead husband’s brother, a Negro. Perhaps because it is so far from social Charleston and friends she knows would not forgive the feelings she has now, friends whose opinions she once cared about and even feared. Perhaps because it is without the carriages and jewels, the clothes from Mrs. Cummings’s shop. Perhaps because it is so small and humble, Addie’s life, in this quiet library, beside this fire, by the smoky light of tallow candles Addie made herself from the rendered fat of her own hogs…She could never have imagined any of these things, nor how happy she would be. But so she is, and so it has turned out to be. Yet there remains, despite their growing closeness, a reticence on Jarry’s part that Addie doesn’t fully understand or know how to relieve.

  It’s the fifteenth of December, a frosty morning, when Jarry rises and accompanies her to the fields for the first time. Oliver and his crew are replacing a broken trunk, washed out by a high sea tide. It’s thirty-degree weather at eight o’clock when they arrive, but by eleven, nearing fifty. She and Jarry stand on a board atop the muddy dike and watch the men—waist-deep in cold black water—float the new trunk, a log of hollowed cypress, into place and seat it as the tide ebbs. They’ve cut three flatloads of fresh, good mud, and it becomes a race to pack the gate and firm it up before the tide comes in. Seeing need and, finally, unable to resist, Jarry grabs a hoe and joins them in the water over Addie’s protest. Then, over his, she joins him. All work at a fevered pace while the river rises, rises. They’re jubilant when it holds. Around a fire, they eat their midday dinner out of piggins and remove their boots and dry their stockings, and then Addie sends the crew home. She and Jarry walk the fields, where she’s had the plowmen turning in the winter rye and oats.

  “What did these fields yield this year?” he asks.

  “Not quite twenty bushels to the acre.”

  He turns to her. “Not quite twenty…”

  “Seventeen, I think,” she says reluctantly. “I’ve often thought about your forty bushels, Jarry. Frankly, I fail to see how it’s possible, but I’ll do whatever you suggest.”

  He walks down a row and pulls a weed that doesn’t yield. He turns to her. “May I show you something?”

  Sweeping aside the new-turned dirt, Jarry shows her a foot-wide swath of rock-hard clay the plow has missed. There’s a swath like this on each side of the furrow he points out, as there is, skillfully concealed, on every furrow in the twenty-acre field.

  “You see what they’ve done,” he tells her, in a tone that’s settled, gentle, unsurprised. “They’ve plowed half the square—less than that, a third—in a third the time, and done a third the job and covered up the rest to make it look as though they’d done it all.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “How would you?” Jarry says. “They’re perfectly aware you didn’t. They’ve taken deliberate advantage. It makes me, frankly, angry.”

  “What are we to do?”

  “One option is to punish them. That’s what they expect, what they’re accustomed to. Do this, and things will go on as before, the way they always have.”

  “What would you do?”

  He frowns and walks away, in conflict.

  “Jarry, if I haven’t said this, I’ve often thought, and felt, this land is far more yours than mine. Your father owned it. You worked it almost thirty years, as I have done for not quite three. Even by that measure, you’ve ten times more right to it than I.”

  “It’s yours in law.”

  “What is that to you and me?”

  They hold each other’s eyes across the distance now, as afternoon declines, and she goes up to him and takes his ice-cold hands. “One day, Jarry, I shall have my aunt’s Charleston house. I shall have her things. I’ll be well off, if not rich, and there’s a rightness, an entitlement, I feel to have what’s been passed down by my people through our line. I’d be hurt and disappointed not to receive these things. By that same measure, that same rightness, I feel Wando Passo is and should be yours. You must believe me. I, too, have given thought to this. Were you to tell me now, ‘Addie, there are three hundred people on this place and each of them, including you, should have the three-hundredth part,’ I’d have the papers drawn.”

  “I wouldn’t accept that for myself.”

  “What, then, would you accept?”

  “All right,” he says, and now he paces off. “All right…” He’s agitated now, intense, when he turns back. “There are eleven hundred acres, give or take, at Wando Passo. If it were mine? If it were me?”

  “Yes?”

  “Beard Island contains four hundred acres. Four hundred and eighteen, I believe. Except for the two squares on the creek, it’s mostly pineland. There’s good timber there, and pasturage. The soil is rich.” He paces toward her, and away again, and Addie feels her heart begin to lift, with what, she hardly knows. “If this place belonged to me?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’d cede it to the people in the street. No, I’d sell it to them for a dollar, so they might possess the whole in fee. I’d have it surveyed, Addie. I’d have it platted out in lots. If there are fifty families in the quarters now…?”

  “Something like…”


  “And perhaps the same number living by themselves?”

  “About.”

  “I’d assign the families five-acre lots, the individuals two or three, however it works out. These, I’d assign by lottery, so that no one should be unfairly advantaged over anybody else. Out of this, I should reserve a common area along the riverfront. The eighteen acres? There would be a wharf, a church, a school, a dry goods store, whatever may be needful. Those who wish to leave might sell their parcels to those who choose to stay. I should allow them to remain in present quarters till they’re prepared to build their homes. When they move, I should allow them to tear down the cabins and salvage what they can in terms of boards and doors and fittings for reuse. What more materials they need, they shall supply themselves with timber from the land they clear or profit from the sale of it. And all this shall be paid for out of rice.”

  “Which they shall rent?”

  “Exactly. You shall continue to own the squares,” he says, “and they shall do the labor, just as they do now. You’ll furnish land and seed rice, tools and teams, which you will also feed, and half the profit shall be yours, the other half to them. Only, Addie, listen…. Though you shall have but half of what you have and had before, there’ll be no more of this….” He kicks the turned dirt in the row. “Nomore of this subversion, this resistance. Instead of half this field, the third, they’ll plow it all. And so, instead of all of seventeen and twenty bushels to the acre, you’ll have the half of forty and forty-five, and they’ll have a stake in making every field bear every grain of rice it can. Each man’s and woman’s participation in the profits will be according to the hours they put in, the work they do, and for the first time, they’ll have homes on land they own. They’ll buy their teams of oxen next, and then a cow, then a horse and buggy. As they prosper, so will you. And those, like Paul and Wishy, with a trade? They’ll build homes while the homeowners work the fields, and they’ll be paid in bartered rice, and so with all of them—the carpenters for building, the boatmen for hauling freight, the butterers and poultriers for buttering and poultrying, and there will be enough. And Clarisse…She’s Father’s child as much as I.”