Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  Has Harlan seen it streak through her blue eyes? God forbid! But, no, he’s smiling, welcoming her. They all are. All but one…

  Standing at the corner of the dock—conferring with the captain about the tierces of rough rice prepared for loading on the Nina now that her outgoing cargo is ashore—he’s already aware of her by the time her eyes find him. Tall and lean-waisted, he wears a coat of fine black gabardine that is slightly worn, and this slight wornness separates him from the other guests as effectively as his physical distance from them on the dock. (Nor, on his lapel, does he sport the cockade of blue ribbon worn by all the rest, with the gold palmetto, the lone star, and the coiling snake.) What separates him still more is the extreme gravity in his agated, dark hazel eyes that are like ocean water when it thins out in a rising wave and the sun shines through it from behind. It is this gravity that draws the bride’s attention like a compass needle to magnetic north, for though it cannot be, it is as if this man (whom Addie feels she knows, or ought to know from somewhere), alone among the revelers, has looked into her depths and seen the bird before it flew. There is no judgment in his face, but no dissembling either. And it is only in the second moment, as Addie tells herself this cannot be, that his expression must mean something else, that she catches the resemblance—it is to the bridegroom. In the third, she realizes who he is: this is the plantation steward, Jarry, Percival’s dark son, the brother whom the brother owns. Only in the fourth and final instant, before she looks away, does Addie note he’s black…. A look sustained for four long blinks—it is no more than that. Yet Addie will remember it for the rest of her short life.

  But, goodness, here is Harlan, beaming at her, even bigger than she recalls! A strident flush has spread from his collar, lapped by a small pink fold of flesh, to his hairline, which has receded to the crown of his large head. On his gleaming brow, beads of perspiration have formed like seed pearls, and Harlan wipes them with his handkerchief, which is heavy, gray with sweat. Handing his shotgun to an elderly retainer, he takes a glass of champagne from the tray the old man holds, then sips and offers it to her. Addie smiles, but, wait, there’s something in it, several crimson berries floating like suspended drops of blood. Now Harlan reaches in. A finger and a fleshy thumb, flushed the same pink as his cheeks, go down. Addie sees the black hair on his knuckle joint float out in the champagne and lie flat down again as he extracts…

  “But, Harlan, what on earth?” she says. “Is it a pomegranate seed?”

  “No, dear, a granadilla, a bit of passion fruit, all the way from Cuba, through the blockade, for you.”

  He holds it out, dripping on the grass. He cups his hand to catch the drops. For a moment, Addie doesn’t understand. Now her face has turned as red as his. All around, the crowd nods its encouragement. And what else can she do but smile and eat?

  The crowd applauds. Just that quickly, it is done.

  Harlan takes her arm. As they start to cross the dock, the steward intercepts. “I’m sorry, but the captain says he cannot take our rice.”

  “He what?” asks Harlan.

  “They were fired on running the blockade, and he’s afraid the weight may compromise his headway. It may be possible to flat the tierces to the bridge at Mars Bluff and take them into Charleston via rail.”

  “See to it then.” Harlan starts to turn away.

  “There’s something else…. We’ve lost the order.”

  “What order?”

  “From the factor. The entire spring order was jettisoned into the sea last night. Cloth, tools, oil, salt, seed…”

  “Damn it, man, I don’t want a list. It’s my wedding party. Don’t bother me with this. Figure something out. Now is that all?”

  Jarry frowns. “It’s getting late. We should call the mincers back.”

  “I want them in the fields till all my friends have shot.”

  “They haven’t eaten since this morning.”

  “Then measure them half a gill of rum when they come in and make it up to them.”

  “Only for the beaters?” Jarry asks. “I’m sure everyone in the quarters would gladly drink to the new mistress’s health.”

  Harlan’s face turns shrewd. “You see how they manipulate me?” he says to Addie. “All right then, damn it, Jarry, all. But I don’t want them drunk. I want them in the fields tomorrow like any other day.”

  “I understand.”

  “You understand, what?”

  Jarry doesn’t answer.

  “That’s right. God forbid that you abase yourself to call me ‘sir’ or ‘master,’ which is what I am.”

  The steward’s expression is neutral, his eyes direct, unflinching, like a pair of taps turned to their full flow. Meeting it, Harlan’s narrow and their look of good cheer crisps like paper in a flame. They hate each other! Addie thinks, and she’s grateful when a bird, fallen in the grass nearby, gives a weak thrash and breaks the spell.

  “Oh, look,” she says. “Poor thing. It’s still alive.”

  Jarry picks it up.

  It is some kind of parrot, bright green with a yellow head and a reddish-orange domino across the eyes. Its breast moves in rapid, frantic respiration and then stops. The eye grows fixed and clouds, and Addie becomes aware of Jarry’s hand—large, long-fingered, and narrow, like a certain kind of trowel, the sort a gardener or arborist might use for some exacting work. Cupped the way it is, holding the dead bird, it strikes Addie as refined and gentle.

  “How beautiful,” she says.

  “These? No, dear, they’re vermin,” Harlan contradicts her lightly. “But, come, you must greet our guests and have a glass of punch.” Harlan takes her arm, but she holds briefly back.

  “What is it?” She seeks Jarry’s eyes now for the first time in the exchange, and he, for the first time, looks back, with that expression that is like a question that, once posed, you cannot rest until you have the answer to.

  “A Carolina parakeet.”

  SIX

  Really? I had no idea there were parakeets in South Carolina.”

  Claire leaned toward the engraving for a better look. Featuring a little green and yellow bird posed in a cocklebur bush in six or seven dramatic, if implausible, positions, Conuropsis carolinensis, “The Carolina Paroquet,” was part of a small exhibit of Audubons hung in the wood-paneled foyer of Harlow’s dining hall, where she was killing time, waiting for the faculty breakfast to begin.

  “Well, there aren’t. Not anymore.”

  After her first glance, Claire had to struggle to avert her eyes from her interlocutor’s amazing helmet of black hair. It was like a toupee so bad it could only be real, she decided. He might have been the George in a quartet of aging Beatles impersonators.

  “They failed to endear themselves to the rice-planting interests,” he continued, “and endeared themselves a little too well to makers of ladies’ hats. The last one was taken in the wild in 1904, I believe it was. I’m Ben Jessup, by the way, college librarian.”

  “Claire DeLay.”

  “I know who you are.” He smiled and shook the hand she offered. “We met in Umbria almost twenty years ago. My uncle was a judge at Casa Grande the year you competed.”

  “You’re kidding. Who’s your uncle?”

  “Glenn Gould?”

  “Glenn Gould was your uncle?” Her hand wandered to the O-ring on the breast of her suit, a peach-colored Vertigo she’d exhumed from dry cleaner’s plastic in the closet, where it had hung for fifteen years. After considerable agony, she’d put it on, having nothing better, and the truth was, it still looked pretty smart and she looked good in it, even if the big chrome motorcycle-jacket-style zipper was a bit too 1989. “Glenn Gould was the reason I became a pianist in the first place,” she said. “I grew up listening to the Goldberg Variations. I must have listened to that record a million times.”

  “A million—really?”

  “No, you’re right—two million is probably closer to it!”

  Jessup laughed. “And do you prefe
r the ’55 or ’81?”

  “Are you kidding—the ’55! Glenn Gould was a god to me!”

  “He liked your playing, too.”

  “He didn’t! He did not! Did he?”

  “Especially the slow movement. You did Brahms’s second, if I recall.”

  “Not the third movement?” Claire said. “I was all over the map on the third movement!”

  “Well, he was moved by it.”

  “Excuse me while I go outside and shoot myself!”

  “Please don’t!” Jessup said, still laughing. “Why would you? I thought you’d be pleased.”

  “I am! I am pleased!”

  Still smiling, he narrowed his eyes, and how could Claire explain what it meant to her that Glenn Gould had listened to her play the andante of the second twenty years before in a competition she had lost and been moved by it? She couldn’t, so instead, she resorted to the stratagem that twenty years of living with a strong, self-centered man had taught her to perfect. “So, tell me about you.”

  “I’m a librarian—I think I mentioned that.” Ben made a funny little moue, and at this evidence of wit, Claire laughed, deciding she liked him. “I can claim credit for this exhibit, though.” His nod returned her to the wall. “Next to Conuropsis is Say’s least shrew, from the Viviparous Quadrupeds. Not one of Audubon’s more attractive renderings, to be perfectly frank. All these prints came to us from the Harlow family, who also bequeathed us Samuel Hilliard’s diary, which I expect you know….” His eyebrows—which bore a familial resemblance to his hair—formed an interrogatory arch.

  “I don’t think I do,” Claire said. “Should I?”

  “It contains a reference to the disappearance at your house.”

  She blinked. “Disappearance? At my house? Wando Passo?”

  “You don’t know the story?”

  “I don’t believe I do.”

  “Good morning, Deanna,” he said. “Join us. Claire, you know Deanna Holmes, don’t you? Deanna, Claire DeLay.”

  “We’ve met,” said the assistant dean, a woman in heavy-framed designer glasses, mahogany-toned lipstick, and basic black, like Ben.

  “Deanna was on my interview committee,” Claire said, beginning to doubt the wisdom of her suit, which seemed altogether too much like a drink with an umbrella in a cored-out pineapple on a black lacquer tray of dry martinis, up. “She had to tell me what a vita was. How embarrassing was that!”

  “Yes,” Deanna agreed, “but here you are. How does it feel?”

  “To be honest, Deanna, I’m petrified.”

  “What on earth of?”

  “Everything!” Claire said. “If you really want to know, I’m terrified Marcel hired me for purely nepotistic reasons—is that a word?”

  “Are you related?”

  “Practically. We’re such old friends, you see, and I was desperate for work. But I’ll tell you both, I made a promise to myself: if I’m not great, I’ll quit. You won’t have to fire me, I’ll run not walk straight through that door!”

  “We’ll hold you to it!” said Deanna, with a bluff, collegial laugh.

  “Please do!” Claire said, laughing back and putting this one in the column headed Hate.

  “Claire lives out at Wando Passo Plantation, Deanna,” Jessup intervened. “Her great-great-grandparents—no, make that great-great-great—disappeared from there at the end of the Civil War.”

  “You don’t say,” said Deanna. “Where did they go?”

  “Don’t look at me,” said Claire. “I went to Wando Passo exactly once when I was small—for a picnic when I was twelve. No, thirteen. The year before I went away to boarding school. Since then, the two of you have probably spent more time in South Carolina than I have. Family history was never my long suit anyway.”

  Both women turned to Ben. “Well, as I was telling Claire, Deanna, what I know comes from Samuel Hilliard’s diary. Hilliard was rector at the Episcopal church in Powatan during the war. Your great-great-great-grandparents were parishioners of his. The man—whose name escapes me at the moment—was a Confederate artillerist at Wagner.”

  “Wagner?”

  “Battery Wagner. It was a sand fort on Morris Island that guarded the entrance to Charleston Harbor from the south. If you saw the movie Glory, you know the place. The Fifty-fourth Massachusetts made their famous charge there. The Federals sent their whole ironclad fleet down here and pounded it for months. Wagner was an awful place, from the descriptions. The men inside lived standing up, elbow to elbow, in a windowless room called a bombproof, the sick together with the healthy and the living with the dead. And this was Charleston, in the summer. Harlan DeLay—just when you stop thinking of it, right?—was killed when the battery was evacuated in ’63. Hilliard went out to the plantation and performed the burial in absentia—or whatever the expression is.

  “Then, two years later, in September 1865, one hot afternoon, who should stroll into downtown Powatan…”

  “You’re kidding,” said Claire.

  Ben nodded. “Harlan DeLay.”

  “Wait,” said Deanna. “You said—”

  “I know,” he preempted her. “The casualty report turned out to be in error. DeLay had been captured and incarcerated at Fort Delaware, a Union prison in Delaware Bay. It took him five months after Appomattox to get home. Apparently, he walked. Several people—including Hilliard’s wife—saw him on King Street that afternoon. They hailed him, but Harlan walked right past them like a ghost. He went into Pringle’s Dry Goods Store, bought one item, a bag of birdshot, then set out for Wando Passo on foot. That was the last time anybody ever saw him. Or your great-great-great-grandmother either, Claire.”

  “Adelaide,” she said.

  “Is this beginning to ring a bell?”

  “A small one. Her portrait’s in the library. She had a child, I think.”

  “A little boy of three. He was orphaned when they disappeared.”

  “I do recall Clive and my aunt Tildy saying something about this.”

  “So that Sunday,” Jessup continued, “right after Harlan reappeared, Adelaide failed to show up at morning service. Hilliard rode out to pay a call and found the table set for dinner. Someone had made biscuits and fried chicken, but the food was scattered, and the house was full of flies. He looked for them, made inquiries, and finally paid a visit to the sheriff. A search was made—that was when they found the child. He turned up in the quarters, but his father and mother were never found. Foul play was suspected, but no proof came to light. No word was ever heard of them again. It was as if one September afternoon—right around this time of year, in fact—Harlan and Adelaide DeLay simply dropped off the face of the earth.”

  “That’s quite a ways to fall….”

  Tucking a pair of jet-lensed granny shades into the pocket of his suit, Marcel Jones breezed into their midst, smelling of the outdoors and Grey Flannel aftershave. “Morning, all.” Gazing down at them from canopy level—he was six foot six—Jones smiled a smile that was boyish, sweet, and ever so slightly sly with the innocent slyness of one who, from the confident redoubt of his good looks, can afford to be indifferent to appearances. “So, who was this who disappeared?”

  “My great-great-grandparents.”

  Jessup frowned and held three fingers up.

  “Great-great-great,” Claire corrected. “From Wando Passo, just after the Civil War.”

  “The War of Northern Aggression, don’t you mean?”

  Claire smiled at this sly dig with lidded eyes.

  “I don’t think I’ve heard this story.”

  “You don’t know them all,” she said. “Apparently, neither do I. You’ve piqued my interest, though, Ben. I’m going to call my aunt Tildy when I get home. If anybody has the scoop, it’s her.” She looked back at Marcel. “Nice suit.”

  He looked down. “This?” A four-button one of English whipcord in a restful and arresting shade of isingreen, this was set off by a plain black T that gave the ensemble a thrown-together air that Cla
ire, who knew him well, was having none of.

  “‘This?’ What, little ol’ me?” Taking her revenge belatedly, she laughed. “Why, I just reached into my closet with my eyes closed and the light off and pulled out the first thing that hit my hand. If it had been a Roman toga or a bearskin rug, I’d be wearing that.” As she mocked, her finger came out of the O-ring, her shoulders dropped, something full of wicked, happy energy was set loose in her expression.

  To the uninitiated, it might have appeared she disapproved of his clothes, but this was not the case. Her old friend’s flair was just so un-Ran-like that it inclined Claire toward a giddy, comic mood. Jones was one of those large men who tower in any crowd, resembling visitors from some far country where people grow twenty-five percent larger than they do here. Against the backdrop of that physical imposingness, his taste in dress was unexpected and ran somehow counter to his personality as well, which was self-assured, soft-spoken, and reserved. Claire liked that reserve the way she liked her great-grandmother’s heavy silver, but she also liked to rattle it. And she was well aware that Marcel, however he pretended otherwise, liked to have it rattled in just the way she’d made her specialty.

  “Sorry, y’all,” she told the company, regressing, for some reason, to a Southern accent. “Marcel and I have known each other since God was a boy in shorts; I’m like the maiden aunt and he’s the five-year-old whose cheeks I sometimes have to pinch.”

  “You were in the Ransom Hill Band together, I believe,” Deanna said, a trifle sternly.