Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  “That’s so,” Addie concedes, but something in her stiffens now.

  “If it were me, Addie, I’d give her title to the Cuban property.”

  “Yes,” she says. “Yes,” says Addie, with relief.

  “That’s where she belongs. She can live there handsomely. I have no wish for it.”

  “Nor I.”

  “This is the dream I’ve long had in my heart.”

  “And us?” she asks. “What are we to be to each other in this scheme?”

  “I don’t know,” he answers. “I suppose you’ll own the seven hundred acres that remain. I suppose I’ll run it and be paid a wage.”

  “That’s not acceptable to me,” she says. “I think Wando Passo should be yours.”

  “That does not sit right with me.”

  “What does?”

  “Half to you and half to me.”

  “Then let us have the papers drawn.”

  “We can’t draw papers till the laws have changed. But I’ll take your hand on it.”

  “Then here it is.”

  And in that frozen, half-plowed field this afternoon, December fifteenth, 1864, while the light is fading, as the sunset comes, bloodred, in a haunting winter sky with tones of lavender and palest green, they stand face-to-face, with cold-flushed cheeks and watering eyes, and shake with hands like icicles. Then they go. Their boots crackle the thin ice, and Jarry helps her as she leaps the quarter ditch. They climb the dike and paddle home and light the lamp.

  And what Addie did not imagine either, what she could never have anticipated, is that it would be this—not some soulful look exchanged over a book of poems, but a handshake in a field, a contract, honor made and bound, that would sweep away his final reticence, that love would come from this. But so it is.

  As they share their quiet supper, Jarry puts aside his fork. “I must tell you something, Addie….”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s a feeling in my heart tonight, a fullness I have never…”

  “Dearest!” She goes to him and takes the chair beside his own.

  “I’ve never known before,” he says. “I’ve had feelings for you, Addie, almost from the start, and I’ve felt, or hoped, that you had some for me.”

  “I have. You know I have.”

  “But what I didn’t know, what I did not believe, deep down, till now, was that there could be justice…justice…. I can’t put in simpler words what that is tome….”

  “I know what justice means.”

  “I know my father loved me, I know he loved as deeply as he could, but he could never give me, Addie, what you’ve given me today, and a part of me has been in pain and bleeding over it, all this time, all these many years. I can’t recall a time that I was ever happy without some sorrow mixed in it, but tonight for the first time…”

  “Tonight?”

  He smiles and shakes his head. “It’s gone. If I should only live to see this done, I’ll die a happy man.”

  “Do you know what I feel?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “All my life, since I was young, I’ve been waiting for something, Jarry, waiting for my true life to start, and it has, it did long ago…. There it was in front of me, and it was you, you, Jarry, all along…. All I could think was it was a bewitchment. I’m so sorry for my blindness.”

  “If you were blind, then so was I,” he says. “It doesn’t matter now. I love you as I’ve loved no one, as I shall love only one time.”

  “And so it is for me.”

  She holds out her hand—there’s no need for more—and they go upstairs to bed. And as Addie blows the candle out tonight, and on the succession of nights that follow this and seem that they will never end, what she comes to in herself is that the wisdom of the girl of seventeen—which said Evangeline must wait for Gabriel however long it takes, no matter what—is finally truer than the wisdom of the bride of thirty-three that said get on with it and live. And no one taught her this—not social Charleston, not her aunt, not MmeTogno’s school. Addie learned this lesson for herself.

  And Christmas comes. She sits on the piazza, hands folded in her lap, as Jarry talks and tells the people the agreement they have reached. They’re solemn as they listen, but that night in the quarters it is Jubilee…. And New Year’s Day, when they walk the squares after the plowmen leave, there are no weeds left, no unturned earth between the rows. And the ewes lamb in February—there are thirty-six!

  And on April thirteenth, a Thursday, finally comes the news—Lee, gallant Lee, has surrendered at Appomattox Court House. At intervals through that sad day, the tidings come—Selma captured…Mobile…Joe Johnston has surrendered his command. And, then, oh, at breakfast, Lincoln dead, and Seward…shot! Rumors spread that every man above the rank of captain in the Confederate army will be hanged, but the smuggled papers out of Baltimore say Beecher pleads for mercy on the South. And as the world outside the gate collapses into ruin, within, the April rice is clayed, the herring run upstream, the dikes erupt in flower—violets, blackberries, the blue and yellow jessamine. The women sow, walking with that lovely swing they have, down the rows, bent over, their skirts hiked, singing as they go.

  And in Maytime, when the rice is under the Long Water, coming into milk, in the time of the singing of birds, one morning Addie sees something different in the dressing table mirror, and she looks down, both hands on her stomach, realizing what is there. She’s four months pregnant when the harvest starts, and they go through the fields with reap-hooks, tying up the cocks with wisps and leaving them to dry tonight before they tote them to the flats.

  Through that spring and summer, the roads are full of men, straggling back home from Virginia, barefooted, some of them, with nothing to eat except a pocketful of parched corn, if that. They’re all thin and bearded, scarecrow men with haunted stares, who look as if they’ve seen too much ever to smile or be put right again. Many make their way up the allée and stand on the piazza, caps doffed, and ask if they can work for food or spend the evening in the barn. They’re never turned away. One afternoon, though, one late September afternoon, as Addie walks up from the river with her alpenstock, in her new, loose frock, she sees such a man, and something in his aspect stops her. Bearded, tall and thin, in threadbare clothes and a worn hat, he’s no different from the hundred others who’ve passed this way, but, unlike them, he doesn’t wait on the piazza or in the yard, holding his doffed hat. He’s in the family graveyard, where a stranger has no business being, staring at the stones a stranger has no business seeing, staring quite specifically, quite fixedly, at one in particular. And though his back is turned, Addie, after telling herself it cannot be, thinks she knows this stranger and what his interest in that gravestone is.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Opening the book of Wordsworth’s poems, the one with the green feather that tumbled from the shelf his first night back, Ran’s eye lit on a verse:

  The old man still stood talking by my side;

  But now his voice to me was like a stream

  Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;

  And the whole body of the man did seem

  “Like one whom I had met with in a dream…” The words rose up in him from some deep place, and Ran spoke them aloud, eyes closed, and checked the text, and they were right, and he felt gooseflesh on his arms.

  How hard is that to guess, though, Nemo pointed out, that “seem” would lead to “dream”?

  “True,” Ran said, deflating.

  The button, though, was real.

  When he opened the top drawer, however, the object in the pencil-well, though round and nickel-sized, didn’t say OshKosh. It wasn’t even made of tin, but mother-of-pearl, like the bridge dots on his old guitar.

  Poor boy, you wanted so badly to believe, didn’t you? You wanted magic to attend. All a dream, Ran, all a dream. Nothing exists but empty space and you….

  Too demoralized to contest the point, Ran took the reading-glasses case without the reading g
lasses from the drawer. As he rolled the joint, a chimp, beaned by a falling coconut, let out a screech on the computer screen and thudded, hard, to earth.

  “You and me, my brother,” Ran said through clenched teeth as he held his toke. Throwing up the window, he listened to the sash weights rocket down their beaten grooves, and blew his smoke into the night.

  In the distance, a whippoorwill cried out, and, farther off, a freight.

  Only minimally anesthetized by the first hit, he turned on the TV, restlessly surfing till he came to a rerun of Saturday Night Live. After a few skits, Eddie Murphy came on in a preposterous Uncle Remus beard, the old routine about white liberals attending summer camp down south, where they pay to pick cotton and receive lashes from Negro overseers. Stoned now, finally, Ran began to laugh a bit, and then it built and built, till he was pealing great guffaws, swiping spilled ashes from his thighs.

  At this juncture, Marcel appeared from the guest room down the hall.

  “Am I keeping you awake?”

  “No, I was just looking for—”

  “Claire? Sorry, no, it’s only me.”

  “Some towels,” Cell said, “actually.”

  Ran made an exaggerated comic shrug. “Don’t have any on me. Come sit down, though. Smoke this chub with me.”

  “I think I’ll pass.”

  “Come on, Cell, you’re always passing,” Ran coaxed, inhaling, speaking through clenched teeth. “Don’t decline my hospitality. You can sit down and smoke a joint with me, can’t you? For old times’ sake?” When he released the hit, his smile, if anything, had brightened, but menace flashed through the hilarity, running none too deep.

  Marcel seemed unwilling to decline. “I’ll sit for a couple of minutes, but on the joint, no thanks.”

  “Fair enough,” said Ran. “Pour yourself a drink. There’s some of Clive’s sipping whiskey on the cart. Do you know this one?”

  “I remember it,” Cell said, glancing at the screen.

  “Funny as hell, isn’t it?”

  Cell shrugged and took a sip.

  “Come on,” Ran said. “If Murphy can laugh at it, why can’t you?”

  “I guess, after all, we don’t all think alike.”

  Ran’s expression sobered now. “So, what, I’m having another cracker flashback? This is racist, too?”

  “I don’t know that it’s racist,” Marcel replied. “I just don’t find it funny.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s too much pain in it.”

  “But comedy comes out of pain, Cell—isn’t that what they say?”

  “Maybe so. But if your mother gets murdered, you don’t laugh at murdering-your-mother jokes. If your child gets abducted by a pedophile, dead-baby jokes may not make you roll.”

  “But your mother wasn’t murdered,” Ran rejoined. “Your baby wasn’t killed. You didn’t sweat on a plantation picking cotton. Neither did your parents or your grandparents or theirs or, probably, even theirs. What’s the statute of limitations on this, Cell? Where’s all this pain coming from in you?”

  “That’s two questions, Ran. On the first, I guess it’s as long—at least as long—as white Southerners regretting the loss of the Civil War. That was a four-year episode in their history they’re still carrying remorse about. Slavery went on for two hundred and fifty. I don’t see the statute expiring anytime soon. And on the pain question, it’s not about me specifically.”

  “Why not?” Ran asked, sitting straighter in his seat. “When does it get specific, Cell? See, this is where I fall down every time. I don’t know how to play the role you want to cast me in, the Abstract Oppressive White Man. I don’t know how to treat you as the Abstract Black Man Oppressed. I think political correctness makes people scared and too self-conscious to act naturally, to just behave like human beings to each other. To me, that’s where racism ends, when it finally gets specific, down to you and me, right here, right now on this sofa, man-to-man and face-to-face.”

  Cell put down his drink. “Say what you have to say.”

  Ran put down the joint and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “We’ve known each other a long time, Marcel.”

  “True.”

  “We’ve been something in each other’s lives.”

  “Okay.”

  “There was a time I believe you cared for me, and I know there was when I did for you.”

  “I’m not disputing anything you’ve said so far.”

  “I don’t have the credibility to preach. I’m as flawed a human being as God probably ever made, Marcel, but I still think relationships come with obligations. If I haven’t always been the best at keeping mine, I came down here to turn over a new leaf, and however it may look to anybody else, I’m trying the best way I know how. I have a wife upstairs, Marcel. We’ve been married nineteen years. I have two small children sleeping in their beds. I’m asking you to put yourself in my shoes, Cell.”

  “Like you did for me?”

  “Didn’t I?” said Ran. “If I didn’t, I’m sorry. I apologize, Marcel. I’m trying now. And sitting here beside you, trying, I think I see someone who’d be desperately unhappy if another man came between him and his family, between him and his wife. I’m torn up about what’s happening, Cell. I’m putting my cards on the table and reaching out to you as an old friend, as another man, as a human being, because in my heart, Cell, I believe that what we have in common is greater than our differences, and I think, in your heart, you know it, too.”

  “I don’t need you to tell me what I know.”

  “You know,” said Ransom, firm.

  “So what if I do?” Cell said. “So what if what we have in common, deep down, is greater than our differences, Ran, but it’s so deep that, on a daily basis, it has no practical effect, whereas the differences are right there on the surface, hot and vexed? The truth is, I didn’t create your problems, the ones you’re mired in now, and I don’t have a solution to a single one. What you really want is for me to put my happiness aside to rescue you from the unhappiness you’ve caused yourself, and why should I do that for you, Ran? Why should I do that to Claire or to myself? It isn’t going to happen, and I’m not going to sit here and let you bait me into getting involved in more of your bad dramas.”

  “That’s right,” said Ransom, sitting back. “I understand, Marcel. You want to withdraw from me, to disentwine and disengage and sever the connection and tell yourself, ‘That Ransom Hill, he’s so retrograde, such a redneck fuckup, he’s not really human in the same way I am or Claire is. So, we don’t have to treat him according to that old notion, the Golden Rule’—remember that one?—‘as we’d wish to be treated in his place. It doesn’t matter how much pain we make him feel.’ But isn’t that where your hurt comes from, Cell, that once upon a time someone did that very thing to you and yours?”

  “Listen, Ransom—”

  “No, you listen to me, Marcel. When I’m finished, you can talk. Once upon a time I screwed you. Tonight, Claire asked for your seventeen-point-five apiece, and I agreed. If that’s what it takes to make it right, so be it. That’s the one specific wrong that I’m aware I ever did you. The year you toured with RHB, you were making seventy-five or eighty grand when that was serious money. You had a nice apartment with a river view. I know you’re carrying some hurt around, but you know, Cell, sitting here, face-to-face and man-to-man, you know in your heart of hearts that if we took the sum of all your days on earth and weighed them in the scales beside the sum of mine, it wouldn’t even be a contest, you’re the happier and more blessed between us two. So what more can I do for you? What more do you want? I think I’ve gone as far as I can go. I’m not threatening you, I’m just laying down my cards. I think we’ve reached the line, Marcel. Here it is, right here.” And Ransom drew it on the sofa now, down the middle.

  “Yes, black people were oppressed, and I regret it, Cell,” he said. “If any of my forebears profited from slavery, I don’t see how. But I still wish for your sake, and Shan’s, and her m
other’s, and everyone’s that history had come down differently. It didn’t, though. The Indians were oppressed as well. They went through genocide. So did the Jews and Palestinians. A long time ago, in England, my people, the Saxons, got their asses kicked by the Norman French, who used to draw and quarter them for stealing deer to feed their raggedy-ass kids. The Romans enslaved the tribes in ancient Gaul, and the Visigoths sacked Rome and led them out in chains. History is full of insults and injustice, and it’s no comfort to you, but one day being a black man in America won’t mean any more to your descendants than being a Saxon means to me. I think that day is coming soon, Marcel. It may not be in your lifetime. Just like one day they’ll have a cure for my disease, and I won’t live to see it either, Cell, which is why I feel I know, a little bit, what it is to stand inside a black man’s shoes. My particular form of slavery is biochemical, it’s in my brain.”

  “It’s not the same,” said Cell.

  “Why not?”

  “No one did that to you, Ran. No human being or group of human beings exploited you for their self-interest or deprived you of your liberty or caused your suffering through malice.”

  “Maybe not,” Ran said, “but, sitting here, staring into your eyes, Marcel, I’m going to tell you I think suffering is suffering, whether it’s caused by human beings, by God, by nothing at all, or just the fuck because. I think what I’ve been through, specifically, is as grievous as anything you have to weigh beside it in the scales. But, see, Cell, here’s the other thing that I believe. You with your grievances, me with my mine, we both feel singled out and specially fucked, but the truth is we’re no different from anybody else. Here’s the secret, Cell. I’m stoned and probably crazed, but what I think is this: human life is a condition of oppression, all of it—black, white, red, brown, yellow, all the same. I can’t prove it, Cell, but just lately now I’ve come to think that’s why we’re here on earth, to experience this condition of oppression and to seek the secret of release—even if we never find it, even if we only get partway. That’s why Keith Richards and Mick and John and Paul heard the blues and got the message. They didn’t need a black translator to break the code, Marcel, they understood it in their bones, because they’d suffered, too. Their people suffered in the mines and in the mills, likemine, and I’m not saying working-class rage and misery in Liverpool or Bagtown is the same as slavery. It’s not. The two do not equate. But there’s a common thread. So, when Robert Johnson and the Reverend Gary Davis and Muddy and Son House and all the others played, those skinny white kids in Liverpool and Muscle Shoals heard it, Cell. Deep inside the prison of the twelve-bar blues, they heard that yearning spirit, rattling the cage and seeking to break free, and they brought it to a million, and, after them, to millions more. That’s why those little girls on Sullivan—remember them?—the ones standing at the barricades in ’64 when the Beatles came to town, that’s why they wept and tore their clothes. The Beatles showed them, for the first time, what human life might be, which they learned from black people, who brought it out of Africa, and those children underwent conversion, Cell, they had a religious experience by proxy for the rest of white America. Now it’s all the fuck mixed up, mixed up in you, mixed up in me, mixed up in my wife and in my children up there sleeping in their beds. And I, for one, am happy, so goddamn happy that it is. That’s it, Marcel. That’s all I know. Human life is a condition of oppression, and religion is the search for the release. Everyone alive is after the same thing—it’s our commonness, and I believe it’s greater than our differences. And that’s why, however singular it seems to you, your pain is comprehensible to me: because I’ve felt my own.