Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  And the one thing that has never dawned on Ran till now, this moment, watching Shanté move among the graves, is that he might stop and turn around and take it on the chin. That he might hold the feeling in his stomach, in his chest, and yet still breathe, and yet still live, and bear now, as a man, what he could not bear then. Only now, today—which is that day, this day—does it occur to Ran not only that he might, but that he must. But sitting here on Harlan’s empty crypt, the thought that he might do so is like the moment when the addict’s eyes glaze and his head lolls back, when he tells himself that in the morning he will stop….

  Even now, watching Shanté, his old friend, with love and total disbelief, Ransom, somewhere deep inside, is still waiting, hoping against hope for magic to attend, to redeem him and distract him from the burden of himself…. This is all there is. This is what life is, what it is right now, not what it was or will be, not what it might or should have been, only what it is right now, here in the graveyard, and no magic to attend. There is no escape from self, except death, and perhaps not even then…. Not even then…Only on the second pass does Ransom grasp that a voice is saying this to him, that it’s been speaking for some time, speaking all along. It’s the voice that he called Nemo, but it isn’t Nemo anymore. The voice has changed. And at this moment, above him in the trees, a scarlet flash and a male cardinal alights in the old cypress and starts to sing. Thrusting out his chest, he sings, full-throated, on a limb….

  I was afraid…

  I was afraid that if I freed them…

  I was afraid that if I freed them, they might

  leave….

  Is this voice in Ransom’s mind, or is the cardinal singing human words? Ransom feels so strange, and he can’t tell.

  And Shanté turns and says, “Come here.”

  “What is that smell? It’s like…”

  “Cloves,” she says.

  “Yes, cloves and sour milk.”

  She nods toward the grave. The nut has fallen, all four pieces, with the white meat up.

  Ran scrapes mildew from the name: Percival DeLay. “She put her father in the pot?”

  “Por su voluntad,” she says. “I’m certain he agreed.”

  “But why? Why would he?”

  “Ask him.”

  “Me?”

  “Ask,” she whispers. Shanté’s looking at him strangely now. She’s gripped his wrists.

  Ran stares down at her hands, then up into her eyes, alarmed. “What are you saying?”

  “It’s here, Ran.”

  He blinks. “In me?”

  “In you. It’s been here all along…. Now close your eyes and ask it what it wants.”

  Ransom, for one moment, stares into her eyes, considering the abyss. Then fear strikes him like a viper, and he pulls away and lurches through the gate.

  “This is bullshit,” he mutters as he heads across the lawn, and Ran feels nothing, absolutely nothing. Yet how long has it been since he felt right? Has it been since that first night?

  “Bullshit…,” he tells himself, but Ran feels slightly woozy, slightly faint, and the odd thing is, he’s been walking for some time, yet he’s no closer to the house. It seems to be receding as he goes, and Ransom, as he stares at it, remembers that he’s on a journey. Something has been leading him, sowing clues along the way, and though this journey only started in the graveyard moments ago, it’s as if he’s been traveling the road for years. The journey is a book with many chapters, and each chapter was an adventure and a stage, and some of them were wonderful, some were sad. There are so many now that he’s forgotten most of them, but it doesn’t matter how many he’s forgotten, all that matters is the adventure he’s on now, and what will happen next. There’s some responsibility involved, and Ransom has the heavy sense he must not fail.

  There are people on the porch, observing him. Who are they? It is…Is it Adelaide and Jarry? They’re posing for the photograph, which will be taken now…. They’re going to die, he thinks, and so am I…. But this isn’t his thought. Whose thought is it? Who am I? For a moment, he must struggle to remember, and Ransom sees that he will never reach them, never reach the house. He experiences a great fatigue. He looks for someplace to sit down. He turns and, just like that, Addie stands before him.

  “Ransom.”

  He shades his eyes to look at her. The sun is behind her now. Her silhouette is black against it, and the sun seems common somehow, like a steel disk, like a coin.

  “Ran!” she says, and suddenly Adelaide is Claire. “We need to talk. I think it’s time.”

  Oh, how he wishes she were someone else…. Or he was. “Can I say something first?”

  Her frown concedes.

  And Ran must make the effort now, must shake off the torpor that’s stolen over him, the urge to sleep. “I don’t know if it was yesterday or some other year, but you asked me why I’m here, Claire, and I knew the answer, and I want to say it now. I’m here because I love you. Because I always have, and because there was a time you loved me, too. Even if you don’t remember it, there was. And even if you don’t now, I’m here because I hope you will again. I want to be the husband you deserve and the father Hope and Charlie need. I’m here to try to be the man I always hoped I might become and never actually was. I hope it’s not too late, because I still believe we have a shot at happiness. I’m here for all those reasons, Claire, and because, along with all the rest, I believe if I could write a song like ‘Talking in My Sleep’ back then, knowing what I knew, then after everything we’ve been through, there’s no reason I can’t write an even better one today. And even if I’m wrong, I think it’s what I’m here to do. I’m going to keep on trying till I can’t try anymore or finally pull it off, Claire, something great, not great for Mitchell Pike, but great for Hope and Charlie Hill, great for you and me.”

  Claire is silent for a moment, then says, “I hope you do it, Ran. I hope you get it all. I really do. For Hope and Charlie’s sake, and most of all, for you. But it won’t be for me, Ran. It won’t be with me.”

  “Don’t say that…. You may feel that now, but you’ll feel differently.”

  “How, Ran?” she asks. “Are you going to make me not love Cell, when I do? Are you going to make me fall in love with you again, when I don’t and can’t and don’t even want to? Ransom, sweetie, listen….”

  “Oh,” he says, or “Ah,” not a spoken word, a groan, a sigh. He bends just slightly at the waist, as though he has been struck, or sledged, or shot. Ran can no longer breathe. His lungs cannot remember how. The soul is breath. You’ll breathe again after your death. “No,” he says, “no, Claire, please, wait, I…I can’t do this now. I can’t.”

  He looks at her with anguish streaming from his eyes, and Claire takes his face between her hands.

  “You have to, Ran. I know it’s hard, but you have to hear me. I’ve waited as long as I can, as long as I’m going to.”

  “What about the kids? Can’t you think of them?”

  “I do,” she says. “I have. I’ve thought of nothing else but them. And you. I put you first for twenty years, Ran. I was the colored girl who sang doo da-doo da-doo-doo-doo, and I don’t blame you. I made the choice myself, but now I won’t be her anymore.” She takes his hands.

  “To me,” she says, “and I’m sorry if this hurts you, Ran, but it’s like God or some higher power has put this love in front of me, and I must turn to it, I must, like a green plant to the sun. I have no power to do otherwise. When I turn to Cell, my whole life brightens, the lights come on, I feel alive, I feel myself, and I realize how far from it I’ve drifted in these years with you. I feel seen by him and understood. And when I turn away, the lights go off, I feel tired and old. It’s a struggle just to keep up with the kids and make it through the day and find the simple energy to live. It’s like this marvelous drug, Ran, only I don’t think it’s a drug at all, I think this is just what it feels like to be human, fully human and alive and healthy and running on all eight cylinders, and even
if it is a drug I don’t want to stop taking it. It’s how I once felt for you, Ran, but not in a long time. For years now, we’ve been sleepwalking through this marriage, marking time, and now that I’m awake again, how am I supposed to let it go? If you love me, really love me, you have to let me go. I would you. If you came to me and said this was happening to you, I would.”

  “Would you?” His voice is soft now. His face is cold. His eyes are hard and bright. “Would you really, Claire? Are you that pure? Are you so sure?”

  “Yes, Ran, I would,” she answers without hesitation. “I’m sure.”

  “What if that’s what evil is?” he says. “Just a form of intoxicating selfishness that feels like goodness, feels like it’s from God, but really isn’t?”

  “Then the world is too fucked up for me, Ran. I can’t be that complicated and believe that what makes me feel alive is evil and what makes me feel dead is good. That’s what I’ve been doing for too long, and I don’t feel any better or holier, I don’t feel improved by all my martyred suffering and self-denial, so why not try what actually feels good? Why not try happiness? That’s what I mean to do. I don’t have anything to lose.”

  “You stand to lose a lot,” he says. “What you stand to lose is everything. Ask me. Ask me, Claire. I’ve felt what you feel. I lived that way for years. It’s why our marriage is in trouble. In the end, it’s not the answer either.”

  “Then what is, Ran? What is?”

  He doesn’t answer. Ran has none to give. He looks at her, then up into the branches of the tree. We are not the peak…not the peak…. Beyond, the sky, so blue. It is that day. That day.

  “Our marriage is over, Ransom, not in trouble. Over. Don’t you see?”

  “Can’t I change? Haven’t I? There must be something I can do, Claire. Something. Hold out some hope for me, some little thread, however thin, however frayed…Because if there’s nothing…if I’m so fucked up and irredeemable…”

  “Then what, Ran? What?”

  Never good enough…Never fucking good enough, right, lad?

  Nemo, now, Ran’s last friend, is speaking in his accustomed voice again. Claire’s face is wavering like a candle flame in wind, and it is blowing Ransom, too, blowing him away. He’s having trouble focusing, trouble answering the question, remembering what the question is…. Then what? Then what? What then?

  I will tell you a secret, Nemo says, not without compassion, a quick, violent death solves many things. It isn’t painful. Is that what you thought? No. Oh, no. Don’t you remember Livingston? The woman, mauled by lions, went into dreamtime, like the Aborigines. She saw higher realms of truth. So will she, Ran. So will he. So, at the end, will you. It will be merciful. And more. It will be mature. Death is simply the end of human striving, dying, no more than going from a hot, sweaty place into an air-conditioned room. And then you’re on a road with many others. It’s the journey you’re on now, in fact, the one you’ve been on all along. Very soon you’ll come to a door. Before it stands a man who holds a book. He’ll scan the columns till he finds your name, and you will be admitted. There will be no lapse in consciousness. You’ll still be yourself. What is lost—your body and the earth and sex and food and birth and death and change, and her, and Hope and Charlie, everything you’ve known and been till now, everything you took, mistakenly, to be yourself—all this is, finally, small. What you’ll gain is your True Self, the thing you’ve sought and cannot have on earth.

  “Like this, though?” Ransom’s voice is pleading. “Not like this.”

  Like this.

  “Who are you talking to?” asks Claire.

  He looks at her and blinks.

  “Ransom, look at me. Who am I?”

  He shakes his head and weeps. “I don’t know. I don’t know who you are.”

  “I’m Claire, Ran, Claire. Look at me. LOOK AT ME.”

  “I can’t,” he says. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”

  And Ransom, after all, can’t find the strength to take it on the chin, to bear the raw and undiluted thing, and so, once more, he does what he does best. He runs.

  Here before him is the old slave cabin Claire converted to a gardening shed. And there, as if at Ransom’s thought-command—leaning in the corner where he left it, when he gassed his whacker—is the Purdey, the right hammer down, the left still cocked upon its unexploded charge. Lifting it, Ran becomes aware how much he’d like to lie down here and sleep, to fall into the black and silent night that befriended him so long ago, but something tells him he must not, that he must stay awake, and Ransom takes the gun outside and sits down, propped against the cabin wall. In the clear light of morning of the day, this day, he admires the scrolled acanthus on the silver plate, the bluing on the barrels of Damascus steel. Ran holds the shotgun in his lap, feeling comforted and thinking, What a thing of beauty, what a mighty thing it is.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Bam…bam…bam…bam…bam…The Purdey’s maddening, repeated roar goes on and on through the long afternoon and deep into the dusk. Like a hand through smoke, the shot moves through the flock. And the black river is littered with them now, studded with dead birds, like strange bromeliads, feathered, warm and apple green, and yet they come, again, again, again, as though they’re as in love with dying as Harlan is with dealing death to them. And why does Harlan love it so? Because each explosion, each loud, violent jolt shouts down the voices in his head, drowns out the memories, reduces the whole world to white, ringing nothingness and almost makes it possible, for the duration of the blast, for Harlan to believe that he can stand what has been done to him and live.

  For he’s heard the rumors long ago. Oh, yes. How could he not? Jules Poinsett told someone what he’d seen. That someone told someone else. The rumor spread. Eventually, it came to him. Harlan disbelieved at first, but at some point that changed. Was it on Morris Island in the pen? Yes, perhaps it was, lying in his shallow hole at night, gazing at the shivering stars as the fiddlers crept over the faces of the dead (he could hear them, when the gusts died, clicking at their work)…. There, as the star shells arced and burst, as the hot iron rained, as men in nearby holes cursed and groaned and wept and prayed…There, as the winter gales blew freezing spindrift over him, reduced to a shivering, half-naked thing, it was easy to remember that his father had loved Jarry best. Paloma had. The Negroes…Who, in fact, had not? Race, so big a thing—in the end, what difference had it made? And why should she, his wife, be different from the rest?

  Staring at the stars was sometimes too unbearable, and Harlan closed his eyes and remembered standing on this dock, this very dock, his wedding day, with Tom—Tom Wagner, who had his face blown off at Moultrie (Harlan stood not ten feet away)—remembered standing arm in arm and singing, “She Walks in Beauty Like the Night.” How long it took to find the music, to get the men together for the thing! But what came back to Harlan in his hole was Addie’s blush, the momentary flicker of embarrassment in her blue, mobile eyes, which concealed so little, as he offered her the granadilla, the berry of the passion fruit brought all the way from Cuba, up through the blockade. That became his settled memory of her, and it would come upon him suddenly and he groaned like those around him, each in his own private hell, actually groaned aloud and rolled onto his face, seeking contact with the ground, the cold, cold earth itself, to conduct away from him the hot and stinging shame he felt and feels again right now, as he pulls the trigger, as the tears streak down his face. For a long time, Harlan blamed Poinsett for spreading ugly lies, blamed himself for putting any credence in them. But, imperceptibly, it came to seem to Harlan that Addie’s failure to appreciate the pains he took that afternoon was niggardly and mean, one small example on a longer and much heavier list. He came to doubt she’d ever loved or truly understood him, and Harlan ceased to blame himself and, from that point, began to blame his wife. And walking home from Delaware—where the few who made it had been shipped again when Charleston fell in February ’65—it seemed to him that Poinsett might not be
lying after all. And if he wasn’t, what was Harlan going to do? Somehow, he thought, when he got home the answer would be clear, but that was not the case. By the time he got to Powatan, his sole clear impulse was to stop at Pringle’s and buy this bag of 08 shot. And here he is this afternoon, knowing only that dark is coming on apace and now, or soon, he’s going to have to put the gun away and walk up to the house and look her in the face and ask.

  She’s waiting for him when he comes. She’s at the table with the chicken fried that morning and the lamp is lit. Her hands are folded in her lap. Her face is grave.

  “So, Addie,” he calls as he sets the Purdey on its stock, “shall we eat?”

  “I’m not hungry, Harlan. I’ve made a plate for you.”

  He turns. “I’m not hungry either. Shall we retire?”

  “I cannot share a bed with you tonight.”

  He stares. “And why is that?”

  “I simply can’t.”

  “I see. You know, Addie, there’s been talk….” He pours what’s left of the Jerez. “Poinsett told me you’d protected him….”

  “I love him, Harlan.”

  “So it’s true,” he says.

  “It’s true.”

  “You’re a whore—you know that, don’t you?”

  “I am not a whore.”

  “You’ve betrayed me.”

  “Yes,” she says, “I have. I betrayed you when I married without love. For that, I ask your forgiveness. But for loving Jarry? For that I will not apologize.”

  “You bitch…you filthy bitch,” he says. “It isn’t only me. You’ve betrayed your name, your family, your class, your race.”

  “But I’ve been true to something else,” she says. “You’ve suffered grievous harm, and as the woman who was and still is, in name, your wife, I hurt for you. But I believe you suffered in a cause that was unjust. God has judged it so. We posed our question, and He answered the whole South in blood and ruin, and history will have no pity on us, Harlan. No pity for what you suffered on Morris Island, none for me because my dreams that I would be a happy mother and a wife did not come true. We’ll die and be forgotten. The grass will grow over our graves. The best we can do now—for ourselves and for each other—is to surrender any claims we had or thought we had and live and let each other live, and do the best we can.”