Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  “Now you try feeling me. Remembering there was a time when I loved you and you loved me, let’s take the race card off the table and level down the playing field and turn the scoreboard back. It’s zero to zero, Cell. Now let’s make it specific. Once upon a time I stole your line. Tonight I gave you seventeen-point-five to rectify. Now I want back what you stole from me.”

  “That’s a good speech, Ran,” Cell said. “There’s some of it I agree with, and some I don’t. But if you want to make it personal, here goes. I loved Claire all those years—years before you even met. I joined the band because of her, and I never tried to get between you. Never. That’s why I left RHB—a fact that, despite all your fellow feeling, never dawned on you. Fuck ‘Talking in My Sleep.’ I didn’t give a shit about the song, and I don’t now. It was watching Claire throw herself at you and watching you hurt her, watching you mess up again and again and again, the same way every time, which is what you still don’t get. It’s what I object to in everything you said. See, Ran, black people will get over slavery when they decide it’s done, not you. The Jews will put the Holocaust behind them when they decide it’s time, not because you or anybody else is tired of listening to them kvetch. This is like a central thread that runs through all you say. You somehow think it’s about you and should be subject to your will and your decision. But it’s not. The same is true with Claire. You had nineteen years to get it right, and whatever the statute of limitations is for me, for her it’s finally run out. See, Ran, her heart and her affections belong to Claire and Claire alone—not you, not me. So, even if I thought you deserved a second chance, or an eleventh, or a twenty-fifth, she’s not mine to give you back. Even if I wanted to, Ransom. And I don’t.”

  Cell left his drink, sweating, where it was and walked out of the room, and Ransom sat there for some time, listening to laughter swell the sound track. He could no longer follow what was going on on-screen. But now his voice to me was like a stream scarce heard, nor word from word could I divide…. The lines ran through his head as the figures flitted past like ghosts.

  Eventually, seeking deeper solace, he went to the stereo. Flipping through CDs, he knocked a stack of jewel cases to the floor. There on top was his most recent effort, A Stranger to Myself, already two years old. Cross-legged on the floor, he opened it and read the liner notes:

  One day you hear a grinding in the works, a rent opens in the bedrock, you peer down, mesmerized, into the molten stuff. You laugh and scoop the magma up. Your hands don’t burn. You stomp in it like a bad child in a puddle in the rain; you wash your face with it and run your fingers through your hair. Then you collect, you collect in glasses, buckets, Mason jars. You fill and fill and return over and over to the well.

  He wrote this at the beginning of the bad time in New York. He was already driving the cab, but it had snowed the night before and Ransom didn’t go to the garage. Instead, he sat up all night writing, not even really knowing what it was, and then at 6:15 the house began to stir. There was no milk, no formula for Charlie, who was eight weeks old, and Claire peeked in and asked him to go, and Ransom, not unwilling, said, “Just let me finish up,” and then the next line came:

  And eventually you start to weary, though it itself, the stuff, is inexhaustible and boils up still, yet you are only human—you’ve forgotten this temporarily, but you remember now. And as you tire, your hands begin to burn, they crisp and blacken like Cajun snapper in a skillet seared by Paul Prudhomme. Still you collect, more and more, as much as you can bear, knowing the hour is late and there will be no more.

  The next thing he knew, it was five after seven, and he heard the locks rattling on the front door, heard Claire say something cross to Hope, heard them bumping and banging down the stairs of their fourth-floor walkup, saw them emerge on the unshoveled sidewalk. Claire glared up toward the window as she wrestled the double stroller up the steps and put the children, bundled in their snowsuits, into it, and set out for Gristede’s, plowing virgin trail. And Ransom, in his T-shirt and his boxers, knew he ought to rush downstairs and take his part, but the image was right there, right there….

  And eventually you fall down, dumbfounded, and gaze at the sky in a bereft, demoralized exhaustion, and where your hands and arms were are now only smoking cauterized stumps. And as you gaze your vacant gaze, the grinding in the works recurs, the rent that opened in the bedrock closes back. And this is all there is.

  The next day or the day after or the following year when you come out of your torpor, you gaze at it on your bedside table. The magma has cooled now, it’s clear like moonshine in a jar. You raise it to your lips, you taste, and, yes, you think, there’s something wild and strange in it. A little starburst winks at you. This is all there is. You pass the jar to others who will tell you, too much tannin! Too much fruit! Too dry! Too sweet! Too sweet and dry! But if you’re lucky, someone, or some few, will look you in the eye and smile and nod and sip again. And in that hope, I pass the jar to you.

  By the time it was done, he couldn’t see his wife and children anymore, but he imagined them…Claire locking the stroller to the meter, hoisting Charlie on a hip, commanding Hope not to run, afraid she’d disappear around an aisle and get snatched and they’d never see her anymore. And if only Ran had overcome his selfishness that one time, and a thousand times like it…For all this he blamed himself tonight, because long ago he’d made a commitment to his art he had no power to reverse. And then she left him one day in the spring. He came home with her coffee and her muffin in a bag and found the letter, and the voice that spoke to him that snowy night, that had spoken to Ransom Hill since he was young…that went, too, in the middle of a song, like God deserting David. Ran stopped sleeping, he sat up in the rocking chair all night where he’d rocked Hope, then Charlie, and he smoked and screened the tape, staring out the window, talking to himself, befriending the little voice that helps you choose between the blue shirt and the red, when there was no one else. And in the morning he showered and went to the garage, and then he stopped showering. Then he stopped going to the garage. And the one taste of happiness he’d known, the one taste of joy, was when Claire, the hundredth time, relented and said yes, when he saw her at the airport, barefoot on the Astroturf, when he saw his children’s faces, heard their voices, crying, “Dad! Da-dee!” His love for her, and them, was like a tumor in his chest, one that Ran had proved beyond all shadow of a doubt he couldn’t live without. And what do you do then, when the news comes down that you will have to live without it anyway, no matter if you can or not?

  Ransom Hill, right now, is sitting on the floor before the stereo, rocking back and forth, talking to himself, holding in his hand the liner notes for an album few people listened to and fewer people bought, wishing he were someone different, someone other than himself.

  And then, moved by something, he gets up, puts five twenties in an envelope, licks the flap, and, copying from the tag, addresses it to Alberta Johns, tying up loose ends.

  FIFTY-SIX

  You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.” The quarter smile on Harlan’s lips seems mocking, but there’s a new and humorless sobriety in his ginger eyes, from which the haze has burned away. They’re clear and deep and there’s something smoldering and strangely voided there, not absent, but wiped out.

  “Is it really you?” she says. “It is, isn’t it?” A thousand currents of crossed feeling run through Addie as she stands before him, still in shock, her finger circling and recircling the orb of polished shell. “They told me you were dead. Two years ago, Harlan, Jules Poinsett stood right there….” She gazes toward the piazza, but doesn’t complete the thought. “Oh, Harlan! I thank God for your life.” Her blue eyes, which conceal nothing, film at this, and she takes his hand and presses it, and this is genuine on her part. But it’s a belated third or fourth response, and its belatedness does not escape her husband, whose hand remains as lifeless in her grip as his memory, these last two years, has been in Addie’s heart.

  “You seem chan
ged,” he offers. Studious, his eyes drop briefly from her face and then come back.

  The blood rushes to her cheeks. “So do you! You are so thin, my dear! You are a rail. A very skeleton! Where did you go? Where have you been?”

  “I was captured. I’ve been in prison.”

  “Prison? But the papers said…”

  “I’ve been in prison, Addie,” he repeats with a tolerating note, like a teacher reciting a rote lesson to a child.

  And can he tell? she wonders. She’s four months now. It’s so obvious to her when she looks in the glass, but few have noticed yet. And Jarry, oh! He’s with the carpenters on the island and will be back any time. How can she get word to him? She can’t! And yet she must. What are they going to do? What is this going to mean? “Come, let us sit you down and put some food in you,” she says. “Let’s find some decent clothes.” (Jarry’s things are in the bedroom, though! His nightshirt, draped over the chair! And did she make the bed today? The sheets!)

  “The birds are in the rice,” he says, gazing past her toward the river.

  “There’s nothing but the gleanings left,” she answers, absent and preoccupied. “It’s in. We have almost forty bushels to the acre.”

  “Where’s my gun?” he asks, as if he hasn’t heard.

  “It’s in the house. But come and eat.”

  And now she hears the gravelly click as he slings his single item of impedimenta on his back—a burlap sack with “08 25 lb” stenciled on its face, in black. She should know what this means, she thinks, reading it. But she does not. As they pass through the park, he stares at the charred foundations of the summer kitchen, overgrown with briars, encouraged by the fire; he frowns, but, otherwise, it occasions no response.

  At the table, two places have been laid, and Addie quickly sweeps up Jarry’s plate and glass. She fetches bread and butter, jam—blackberry, from the canes that grow so thickly on the dikes. She spent the morning frying chicken, and before him now she sets the mounded plate. Harlan regards it like Franklin in Paris in his coonskin hat, surveying his first reeking plate of snails. He presses his finger into the warm yellow butter, sniffs and rubs it to nonexistence in the whorls of his own fingerprint, like salve. “You forget there’s a world with things like this in it.” His tone does not imply that he takes pleasure in remembrance.

  “You must eat, though, won’t you?” She pours a glass of milk and sets it, foaming, at his place.

  “The smell of it revolts me.” Pushing it away, he rolls his eyes to white. The lids briefly flutter like a girl’s, and this somehow moves her past her fears to an awareness of his state.

  “Is there any whiskey?”

  “There’s wine. Your Jerez. We hid it in hogsheads in the pond….”

  “Bring that.”

  She pours him half a glass, but Harlan puts a finger under the decanter and makes her fill it to the top.

  “But, Harlan,” she says, sitting next to him and watching as he drains it in a single draft, “where did they take you? Jules said you were drowned in the evacuation….”

  “I swam,” he says, refilling. “I tried to get to Sumter, but the tide was running hard against me. I was dazed and wounded. The water deepened and the current tugged and finally swept me off my feet. I grabbed a bit of wreckage and it carried me down Moffit’s Channel and, finally, out to sea. Next morning, I was picked up by the coalers on the Nahant. They were out to catch a breath of air and saw the circling gulls. I was transferred to Port Royal. They sent us to Fort Delaware. I was there eleven months. I was ill that winter,’63. I don’t remember spring. I couldn’t tell you if there was a spring that year….” He looks away, bemused, and she does notknow what to say.

  “In August, they told us there was to be an exchange. We’d heard it many times before…. But this time seemed to be the truth. They sent six hundred of us south to Beaufort. I was expecting to be home any day. They put us on a boat, under a white flag, and told us we were going back to Charleston. The bastards. Instead, we went to Morris Island. There was a pen they’d built—like our cattle pens, but not so good as that. It’s on the north end, between Gregg and Wagner.” Now, another glass, the third. “They put us in the line of fire from Sumter. From our own guns. We were shields, you see, to protect their gunners in the batteries, and half the shells our own men fired came down on us. The Yankees, Addie, sat there safe in their revetments, behind the same palmetto logs we’d cut, the sand and earth we’d dug. They drank and laughed, taking bets on which of us would live or die that night, that afternoon.” And, finishing his third glass, he wipes his mouth and pours a fourth. “We had no shelter, not from weather, not from guns. The first few months, we dug holes in the sand like crabs and tried to hide. It made no difference. Especially from the seacoast howitzers. Did you know that was my gun? Yes…Oh, yes. In the Twenty-first.” Another heavy sip. A blink. A wince. “Then winter. The gales came in. They blew our shirts to rags. We had no coats, no wood for fire, no water, none clean at any rate. Men had to squat and do their business where we walked and slept and ate. So many died they stacked them up like cordwood on the beach. At night, the fiddlers crept out and picked their bones. The guards accused us of eating our own dead. And some…” Harlan looks at Addie now, and then his eyes glaze, seeing something else. “You could tell those boys, Addie…. They kept the rose upon their cheeks….” And now the quarter smile on Harlan’s lips seems almost mocking. “After a while, when the shelling commenced, we took no notice. We sat in the open, playing cards, betting who would get it, both amongst ourselves and with the Yanks. And those who did, Addie? We considered them the lucky ones.” Three-quarters of the bottle is gone now. He seems dulled and weary suddenly; then he frowns. “You hear those goddamned birds? Where is my gun?”

  “But I’ve told you, dear, the rice is in. It’s being threshed.”

  “Why let them multiply to cause us future harm?”

  He starts to rise, but stops when there are footsteps on the porch. They’re light and springing in a way she’s come to recognize, a way that means that Jarry’s come home happy, bearing news. “They’ve driven the first puncheons,” he announces, and he walks in, smiling, his hat off. Sometimes he throws it toward the upright of the chair, like the ringtoss at the fair, and she can see that he’s about to do this now. It’s in his hand to go when he sees Harlan sitting there, and he stops cold. His whole posture stiffens and becomes more formal, like a defendant in a court, an enlisted man before an officer. Addie realizes, with a pang, that she hasn’t seen him in this attitude for months and has grown accustomed to his ease and naturalness.

  “They told me you were here,” says Harlan. “I, frankly, doubted it. I didn’t believe you’d have the gall to show your face.” He looks at Addie now. “You know he fought with them?”

  “You must put your differences behind you now,” she says. “You both did what you believed was right. The war is over.”

  “You’re naive, my dear, if you think that…. I’m curious, though, Jarry. After you betrayed us, after you betrayed your flesh and blood, what made you think we’d take you back?”

  “I’m not here because of you.”

  “Why are you here?”

  Jarry doesn’t answer this. He can’t. Nor can he look at her. All he can do is hold Harlan’s stare, his hazel eyes direct, unflinching, like a pair of taps turned to their full flow. All this suffering and death, thinks Addie, all the boys with flushed cheeks running, yelling, up so many hills, hill after hill, four years of it, and it meant nothing. These two brothers hate each other exactly as before.

  “What puncheons?” Harlan says.

  “My dear,” says Addie, “we’ve come to an arrangement with the Negroes. You must understand…. I thought you were dead, and I’ve had to count on Jarry to advise me.”

  “I see. And what advice have you received?”