by David Payne
Mother duck said quack, quack, quack,
But only one little duck came back….
As he punched out the kiddy tape, the radio came on, and what else could it be?
We said, “It’s so tru-oo-ue,”
We said, “It’s so deep”…
Ransom laughed and reached reflexively to turn it off, the way he had a dozen times before, then didn’t. Pulling into traffic, he gave up and listened, really listened, for the first time. Mitch Pike had taken the driving backbeat of the original, steeped in old-time Stax/Volt Afro-funk, and slowed it to a ballad tempo. It was this that had Ran contemplating suicide the first eleven times he tried to listen and could not. Now, though, as he crawled along the strip, he realized Claire was right, Pike had found a sweetness in the song. Not that sweetness had been missing in his version, but it was just one of many things he’d put into his recipe. Ran had written “Talking in My Sleep” about the devastating end of a great love—his for Shanté Mills. The grief and fury he’d put into it, the despair, the deep question he’d posed about relationships, his challenge to the gods—all gone. Mitch had simplified—that was his masterstroke. Ransom suddenly understood that this was why Pike’s version had gone number 1, where RHB’s topped out at number 23, and the ghost of his old agent, Ponzi Gruber, floated up, telling Ran, the way he had way back at the start of everything, The cream always rises, Ransom. Always. And Ran suddenly realized that RAM’s version was a better song.
He’d reached the light now, and he turned. Out there on a two-lane between high walls of trees, it hit him with a clang of rare finality that the success he’d dreamed about and worked for was never going to come. Deep into the country now, it came home to Ransom that his work, the work into which he’d poured the best part of himself for thirty years, was going to disappear without a trace.
But all it ever was
Was talking in our sleep, baby,
Just talking in my sleep….
The tires went tump-tump, and Ran was home.
Only as he pulled into the spelled green of the allée did it occur to him he’d driven past the CVS without a thought of turning in. Ransom knew he really ought to turn around. After all, he wanted to be good…even if he’d slipped a tiny bit. He’d promised Claire. On the other hand, he was dog-tired and wanted to check his song on the off chance that it might prove him wrong.
Like Buridan’s ass, suspended between a bale of righteousness and a bale of sloth, he hesitated, then chose sloth. He had to drive back for the cocktail party later anyway.
“Can’t wait for that,” he told himself aloud, as good intentions slipped a further notch. And maybe the old unimproved, unmedicated Ran wasn’t too dangerous to unleash, for a few more hours, on the friendly world that had convinced him of his error.
Inside at the partners desk, he reread his song and laughed. Words that not five hours before had fallen with the heavy chink of gold doubloons now seemed like charred and pitted scoriae brought back by chimpanzee astronauts from the dark side of the moon. Apart from strangeness, they held no interest whatsoever, and even if they’d shimmered with immortal genius, Ran had no idea where he’d meant to go from here. The song, in short, was gone.
Rifling the drawer, he took out Clive’s old box. “Hell, yeah,” he told himself, “let’s get happy and go shoot some freaking guns!”
Outside, he loaded both barrels per instruction, then fired the first, surprised when the recoil knocked him back two steps. The muzzle belched a thick black cloud of acrid smoke. Fanning his way through, he found the Costco can of black-eyed peas thirty yards from its original position, reduced to smoking shreds of unidentifiable shrapnel, not much larger than a pile of fingernails.
“Damn,” he said, sobered. “This thing could saw a man in half, couldn’t it?”
Woman, too.
“Woman, too,” he said, agreeing with himself. Having satisfied the urge and even spooked himself a bit, he stared toward the back porch, noting how the yard sloped slightly downhill from the river toward the house. Kneeling like a golfer on the green, Ran assessed the lie.
“Two hundred years of runoff. Yep, that could do it.”
Gassing his whacker in the old slave cabin Claire had turned into her gardening shed, he waded into the periwinkle, clearing the area where he thought the new swale should go. It would cost some bucks, but a few hours’ dozer work could send the water toward the road. That solved, they could see about the ants.
As Ran revved the engine, the doubled hanks of nylon blurred into an orange-tinted cutting wheel. He kept a weather eye out for the stob as clump after leafy clump went down, hemorrhaging a green fragrance and filling his cuffs with vegetal dicings. Pretty soon, his sweat-drenched T was modeled to his back, suggesting uncooked chicken breast.
Pausing to catch his breath, he stared toward the graveyard, which was laid out beneath an enormous cypress tree, whose branches bristled against a threatening blue-purple sky. Beyond the river, threads of soundless lightning flashed in the direction of Columbia.
As Ransom waded in again, the stob found him, snagging the line so hard it almost wrenched the trimmer from his hand.
Kneeling, Ransom took a closer, daylight look, as the first raindrops fell like tarnished pennies, splatting overlapping circles in the hot red dust.
What he’d uncovered was actually a foot, an iron foot. Feline in appearance, a little larger than a thumb, it suggested some big jungle cat, a jaguar or a leopard. Its crudely fashioned pads still showed the blacksmith’s hammer marks, and there were tiny claws that age or use had almost worn away. A rusty link of hand-forged chain protruded from the clay beside it.
“What the hell have you done now.”
He reached toward it, then, thinking better, fetched a spade and gloves out of the shed. In short order, as the rain fell harder, two more feet emerged, then the domed bottom of an overturned black pot—one might have said a cauldron. Buried in the anthill upside down, it was wrapped with chain, a single length crimped back on itself in a continuous loop. When Ransom yanked, the links crumbled like cigarette ash, smearing his gloves with orange chalk. Reaching down, he heaved till, finally, with a sumping whoomp, it came.
Inside were many things—some identifiable, most not—suspended in a hardened composite of mud and clay. Like flotsam from an ancient shipwreck, bits and corners peeked out from the frozen waves of earth—a stone, a candle stub, a coin, a nail, a shell. There was a small glass vial half full of fluid. Ran lifted it and something clinked inside. He held it to the light but couldn’t see through the blue glass.
Ran was hesitant to touch the pot with his bare hand, but his little voice said, Oh, go on…. You just scared yourself last night. It can’t do any harm. And when he shucked his glove, he did feel something coming through the iron—not heat, but some subtler energy, difficult to name. It sent a tingle to his earlobes, another to his loins.
At that moment, a slanting sheet of sunlight broke out of the rain, setting the drops individually on fire like prisms on a chandelier. Ransom closed his eyes, and just like that, the song was back and had the heavy chink of gold doubloons again and all their deep-sea gleam.
When it began, nobody can remember.
No doubt at the beginning: one fine day
The surface world collapsed around his longing.
The deep world yawned and took his life away….
Some Geiger counter was going off inside him, giving warning clicks, but Ransom found it hard to tear his hand away. Just before he forced himself, something glanced along his back, as though someone had passed a candle not quite close enough to burn. It was the pressure of a pair of watching eyes, and when Ransom turned around, he saw someone standing at an upstairs window of the house.
“Claire?” The word died on his lips, and even as he spoke, Ran knew that it was not his wife. All he could make out was a silhouette, but Ran was almost sure the figure was a man.
EIGHT
Madam, I insist! You must
partake. This receipt is of a sacred provenance, brought down from Sinai with the tablets of the law. It’s Colonel Lay’s own punch.”
“Colonel Lay?” says Addie as she takes the cup. Harlan, it would seem, owing to the late arrival of the Nina, is in a state of more advanced conviviality than she has seen him in before in Charleston. And she notes, too, that the crowd pressing in on them beneath the tent is mostly male and military—members of his regiment, the Twenty-first Artillery, some boys barely half his age, who seem to regard him as a roué uncle and are eager to be led astray. The women in attendance have withdrawn to the piazza, where they can be seen fanning themselves and watching the carousings from within the cinched circles of their bonnets, with narrowed eyes.
The event is teetering on a precipice, in danger of disintegrating, momently, into a whorehouse free-for-all, a fact underscored by the Purdey’s unsettling, repeated roar from the landing below, and by the banquet table, which is wonderful, but like no Lowcountry banquet table seen before. Paloma and Clarisse, her daughter—who have yet to show themselves, though Addie looks continually, eager to ascertain what sort of creatures they may be—have thrown a wedding al estilo cubano. Instead of a roast beef or leg of lamb, the central offering is a pig—not a suckling, but a hundred-and-fifty-pounder—presented splayed out like a bearskin rug with head and trotters still attached, the latter decorated with pleated paper frills, like the perfumed cuffs of an Elizabethan dandy. The creature rests on a grassy bed, one might almost say a field of cilantro, and smells quite pungently—yet appetizingly—of that herb, as well as of sour orange juice and garlic. In lieu of an apple, it has a mango in the cleft of its split chin, and is surrounded by piles of other tropic fruit—mameys, guanabanas, and papayas, some imported, others grown on the estate, transplanted here from Cuba long ago by Percival, who is—or was, before his health declined—an avid horticulturalist. Furthering the Cuban theme, a pair of girls in stiff new frocks wend through the crowd, dispensing curtseys together with refrescos—limonadas and panales—from a tray, as well as savory little pastries known as empanadas filled with crab or cheese and guava.
But the greatest wonder is the cake, which represents a large imperial building in the colonial Spanish style. Constructed of fondant and royal icing, it features an arched arcade at street level that supports balconies above and fronts upon a boulevard. There are several small black carriages—the sort Habaneros call quitrines—with licorice wheels and horses and postilions—realistically contrived with field boots, quirts, and beaver top hats—of colored marzipan. Across the street is a park with gravel paths of nonpareils, grass of shredded, bright green coconut, and palms whose trunks are sticks of cinnamon.
“Colonel Lay of New Orleans, Addie,” Harlan answers as he dips the sterling ladle. “He’s the proprietor of the Santa Isabel, a hotel in Havana, the hotel in Havana, I should say…. His rum punch is famous. Besides himself, I am the only man in the Northern Hemisphere who knows the formula. And did he give it to me from the goodness of his heart?”
“Nooo!” say several of his youthful protégés, like good Episcopalians, anticipating the lay part of the responsive reading.
“He did not, madam,” confirms the groom, their priest. “I won it from him at el monte, which is a blood sport as played by Colonel Lay. And I tell you truly, Addie, I do not exaggerate, that gentleman wept tears, large tears of blood, in fact, like Jesus Christ upon the cross, as he wrote down the ingredients and measures. I keep it with me always, here, next to my heart together with the gift you gave me.” With two fingers and a thumb, Harlan actually parts his coat, but either this is in jest, or he’s forgotten to wear the miniature she presented him, with her image—in tempera upon ivory—in one oval of the locket, closing face-to-face with his upon a fragile golden hinge. “But, come now, drink up! You must set an example for these effeminate, fainthearted children.”
“It is…very strong,” she says.
“Strong?”
“A bit like breathing fire.”
“Yes, yes…Better…” He stirs the air beneath his chin, as though to summon lyricism.
“Rum-scented fire,” she arrives at now, “with a mist of orange peel.”
“Ha ha, boys, is she game?” he says. “I told you she was game. Those oranges are the little bitter ones that Father grows around the house. They make an excellent marmalade as well. But, look, you’ve had the last of it,” he says, glancing in the bowl. “We must make another batch. Where’s Clarisse? Well, damn her, never mind. Come, Addie, will you go with me to the storehouse? We’ll fetch the rum ourselves.” He leans close to whisper. “We’ll steal a moment to ourselves.” And, then, in his plangent public voice, offering an arm: “Come, shall we have a little tour about the grounds?
“Thank God!” He mops his brow as they stroll off. “I thought I’d never get you to myself.” In the shade of the allée, he turns and takes her hands. “How are you, Addie?”
“I am well.”
“And your trip? Were you terrified?”
“Exhilarated, rather, though I confess it without pride.”
He smiles. “Then I am proud for you. And the party—are you pleased?”
She hesitates, but it is brief. “It’s thoroughly original, my dear.”
“Yes, original,” he says, with a face as suddenly sour as his father’s oranges. Reaching in his coat for a cigar, he bites off the end and spits. “I’m not sure our friends know what to make of it. They catch the reek of garlic and smile and wave away the tray. I should have known better than to entrust it to Clarisse. Damn it all, though, we had a terrible row here early in the week.”
“You and she?”
“No, the whole damned lot of us,” he says, puffing as he lights. “You saw how Jarry was with me?”
“Yes?” she answers, not quite sure.
He nods, waving out his match. “He and Paloma are still furious. Father hasn’t spoken to me since or deigned to budge out of the house today. I thought Clarisse was angry, too, but then she came to me all smiles and said she wanted to bury the ax and throw this party. I said yes to keep the peace.”
“But, Harlan, truly, though, it’s quite remarkable. That cake!”
“Yes, the cake. Do you know what I asked her for? For Sumter. And this is what I get, the Plaza de Armas in Havana.”
“So that is what it is.”
He nods. “The building is Tacón’s, the opera house.”
“But it’s lovely, Harlan. I’ve never seen the like.”
“But, damn it all, I wanted Sumter. I wanted to remind you of that night.”
“But I don’t need to be reminded. I remember every detail perfectly.”
He concedes a tentative smile. “So you’re happy?”
“I am happy.”
“You are fine?”
“I am.”
“May I kiss you?”
She laughs. “Certainly not! Not here, where everyone can see.”
“To the storehouse then!”
“But, wait,” she says as they pass the kitchen house, a log-and-daub-walled building with smoke boiling from the two great fieldstone chimneys on the gable ends. Outdoors, under the attached shed roof, a line of women in headkerchiefs, arm-deep in suds, are creating an enormous clatter as they wash the plate and crystal in a six-foot wooden trough. “Perhaps I should peek in and pay them my respects.”
“No, Addie,” Harlan says. “You’ll meet them soon enough. I want to speak to you about this matter first. I meant to wait, but, damn it, it’s plaguing me. We’ll go to the storehouse. It’s more private there.”
And now, with a slight heaviness upon their mood, they proceed south along the sandy road that parallels the river, past the gardener, Peter, who is placing woodpile manure on the black raspberry vines. The kitchen plot is enormous—eight hundred feet by eighty or eighty-five—and Peter’s boy is dressing out the rows of strawberries. There are at least three varieties that Addie can see, including the tiny ones called fra
gole Alpine, which she tasted once in Italy with Blanche and has not had since. A short distance from the house, they enter a cluster of buildings that surrounds the great shake-sided rice barn like a village in New England might surround its church. The carpenter’s and wheelwright’s shops are here, and in the forge, the ringing of the hammer stops as they go by. The guests’ phaetons and barouches are parked along the shoulder of the road beside the stable, where Harlan stops and points in through the door. “Look, there, Addie, do you see the little yellow rig?” Amid the farm wagons and family carriages, half obscured by hanging tack, is a child’s cart. “That was mine when I was small. I had a goat named Beelzebub, though we should have called him Satan, based upon his temperament. He pulled Jarry and me up and down this lane as fast as we could go, and more than once he threw us in the ditch. You see this?” He bows his large bald head and shows her a white scar.
“I do.”
“I have Beelzebub to thank for that.”
“There.” Kissing the spot, she pulls back when a groom appears with both arms full of hay.
“Marse, mistis,” he says, smiling shyly, tossing clumps before the tethered horses in the line.
“That, now, is a respectful greeting. Hello, James,” he calls. “Yes, we see you winking there.” His tone is friendly, bluff, but cool, yet when the hounds set up a cry and leap against the kennel fence, his face lights up.