Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  Jarry’s whole face concentrates. His eyes fill with sympathy.

  “I saw them,” Addie says. “I followed him to the cottage. You told me not to, but I did.”

  His look is grave. He rests his whole hand on her shoulder now. He doesn’t look away. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m afraid you may have taken fever.”

  She shakes her head, but Jarry reaches out, and Addie sees the old scar on the underside of his left wrist. Her eyes go somber over it. They seek his out, but from some innate delicacy, he turns his hand, as though to hide what she already sees. With the back of his wrist, he touches her brow, a gesture brief and wholly circumspect, yet no man has ever touched her there. A conversation occurs between them, with troubled implication given and troubling inference received, in a single wordless glance.

  “Why did he marry me?”

  “To save himself.” Now Jarry sits.

  Addie, who does not expect an answer, certainly not one so sure and swift as this, gazes into his eyes and weighs the truth of it.

  “From her?”

  He nods just once.

  “That’s why you gave me the poem….”

  “I gave it you because you were innocent and deserved the truth.”

  Her eyes brim, showing him the gratitude she doesn’t speak. “There’s something I must tell you….”

  “There’s something I must tell you, too,” he says. “Father died last night.”

  “What? Jarry, no!” Her hand goes to his arm. “Oh, Jarry, I’m so sorry. And here you are, out chasing me. We should go back.”

  “Yes,” he agrees, yet neither makes a move to leave. “Mother found him a little while ago. He had this strange expression on his face, as though something had come into the room, and whatever it was, it wasn’t what he was expecting.”

  As the news settles, she lets her hand rest where it was. “I think he was ready, Jarry. He spoke to me about it. He seemed more curious than afraid. I hope, when my time comes, I can be half as brave.”

  He makes no answer, gazing out over the water meadow, arms circling his knees. A time passes in silence there’s no need to relieve. “There’s a verse,” he says eventually. “It’s been playing through my head for weeks….

  “‘The old man still stood talking by my side,

  But now his words to me were like a stream

  Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide.

  And the whole body of the man did seem…’”

  Briefly, emotion overcomes him, and Addie allows her grip to tighten on his arm till it subsides.

  “‘And the whole body of the man did seem

  Like one whom I had met with in a dream,

  Or like a man from some far region sent

  To give me human strength….’”

  “It’s all right, Jarry….”

  He shakes his head and cannot finish it.

  “What is the poem?” she asks him, when a decent interval has passed.

  “‘Resolution and Independence.’ That was the first poem he ever read to me.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “You were close….”

  He shakes his head and wipes his eyes. “I hated him. Our friendship began over that poem.”

  This is the moment Addie will remember, when she beholds who Jarry is, and it is not as a black man, not even as a man, that she recognizes him, but as a being like herself in a way no one has been before. Like a tuning fork that has lain inert till now, something in her rings responsively, as it hears, for the first time, the true, specific note that it was forged to answer. Her expression as she looks at him is no longer wan and drained. Her eyes have regained their depths. She nods to the snippet of green vine he’s plucked and is unconsciously twirling in his hand. “All morning I’ve breathed the scent of that and wondered what it was.”

  “It’s partridgeberry. The old folks call it lovers’ vine.”

  Addie blushes, but holds his stare. “Why do they call it that?”

  He lifts the two white blooms. “When these flowers drop, they form a single berry with two eyes.”

  The fatigue in him, Addie realizes now, is beautiful.

  Jarry hands the snip to her. “What is it you wished to tell me?”

  Now her expression drops as she recalls. “Last night I saw something, Jarry. In the swamp, as I was running. It was hidden in the hollow of a tree. It frightened me.”

  “What did you see?”

  “It was a pot, I think. It was partly covered, but I think it was an iron pot. And there were things in it.”

  “What things?” His tone is suddenly grave.

  “Horns,” she says. “The horns of some animal, a ram, perhaps. Links of chain. The limbs of certain trees. Harlan’s locket, too—the one I gave him as a wedding gift. A knife was driven through the hinge.”

  He frowns and ponders. “Could you find the place again?”

  “I don’t know. It was dark. I think I came from there.” She points, and Jarry searches till he finds her prints in the wet ground. Leading the horse, they backtrack, walking silently. After fifteen minutes, they reach the rise of ground, the fallen tree.

  “There,” says Addie solemnly, pointing to the hollow.

  Jarry peers inside and blinks. He shelves his eyes to see, then turns to her with a blank expression.

  “What?”

  “There’s nothing here.”

  “That can’t be.” She joins him now to look. “It was here last night, Jarry. I know it was.”

  With the nail of his index finger, Jarry picks up something small and shiny from the floor. He holds it to the light. It’s a dime, a silver dime, incised with Seated Liberty.

  “I don’t understand,” she says. “I’m sure this was the place.”

  “Come,” he says. “We need to tell my mother this.” Mounting, he reaches her a hand and swings her up behind.

  For a moment, Addie feels the awkwardness of where to put her hands, but when the horse starts off, the motion throws her toward him and she puts her arms around his waist. As they ride in silence, the voice she knows but doesn’t know from where, the one she asked for help, which whispered yes, now tells her, as she lets her tired head fall on Jarry’s back, This is the help you’re to receive.

  “But, Jarry,” she says as they reach the drive and slow down to a walk. “Jarry! It’s just occurred to me—you’re free!”

  “No,” he says, “the will is gone. Mother searched the desk this morning. It isn’t there.”

  “No, but, listen,” Addie says excitedly. “Listen, Jarry…”

  He turns partway to face her in the saddle.

  “Addie!”

  At this moment, Harlan’s cry breaks in on them, and they turn toward the house as he steps onto the piazza. Seeing his glassy eyes and brooding face—he appears to have been waiting for some time—Addie never gets the chance to speak.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Marcel saw the silhouette reflected in the gleaming oils of Addie’s portrait and was the first to turn his head. “Hey, Ran.”

  Ransom, from the doorway, answered, “Hey.”

  Claire looked around. “The kids asleep?”

  “Yeah, they are.”

  “Is something the matter?”

  “Actually, I don’t know.”

  She studied him. “Well, are you going to stand there speaking koans, or are you coming in? We’re looking at this poem you found.”

  “You guys go ahead.”

  He turned away, but she came after him and caught his arm. “Ransom, come sit down. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’m just going to take a walk.”

  “Where’s the Purdey? I saw it isn’t on the wall.”

  This took him by surprise. His morning outing seemed like something from a prior era now. “I guess I left it in the yard.”

  “What were you doing with it in the yard?”

  “I wanted to see if it still worked
.”

  Claire frowned. “And does it?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Actually, it works quite well.”

  With that, he left the pair of them to puzzle out the terms of the old text and took the back way out. The air was like a humid, faintly cool caress. In no mood to be touched, Ran walked away from the illuminated house into a hoarse euphony of katydids and peepers, beneath a black sky smeared with stars.

  Retracing his steps, he made a perfunctory search and failed to find the shotgun. But it was dark, and he was too disturbed to try that hard.

  A waning gibbous moon was rising over the swamp. As he approached the hole he’d dug that afternoon, a coal-black silhouette materialized against a screen of shimmering light. It took Ran barely a second, maybe only half, to realize it was his reflection in a pool the thunderstorm had left, but for that second, that half of one, the figure staring up resembled someone else.

  And what if it doesn’t happen, Hill? What if that happy future you’ve imagined doesn’t come to pass?

  The questions were his own—Ran knew full well they were—yet it almost seemed the figure in the pool whispered or somehow insinuated them into his mind. His thoughts were becoming more and more abnormal—Ransom watched and knew the warning signs: chief among them, the fact that the further they deviated from normality the truer they began to seem, not in the common way, but with some harder, higher truth difficult to achieve, and once achieved, more difficult to stand. This dark other in the pool was not a stranger, nor a friend. He and Ransom were acquainted from way back, and Ran had been on the run from this encounter for some time.

  And what happens when you find me?

  “Sorry, bub,” Ran said aloud, “but what I’m interested in finding isn’t you.”

  So what are you interested in finding—your “True Self”? the voice asked with a trace of hurtful scorn. Would you even know the thing to see it? And who’s to say that I’m not he?

  “I guess I’ll have to go with my gut hunch.”

  That’s really stood you in good stead so far.

  “Fuck off,” said Ran halfheartedly, suddenly having trouble remembering which voice in the conversation was his own, and why it mattered, if indeed it did.

  Entering the graveyard by the creaking gate, he sat down on a crypt, demoralized and out of gas. And now his sadness and his fears washed over him, and Ransom let them come. What if he lost Claire and the children? What if that sense of throbbing vividness she’d radiated at the airport yesterday came not from happiness at seeing him, not from being mistress of her own demesne again, but from loving someone else? What if however much he wanted it to work, however hard he was prepared to try no longer mattered? What if Claire was out of reach? The thought that she might give her heart to someone else had somehow not occurred to him in all these months—much less that she might give it to Marcel. And why? Because Marcel was black? Whether this had weighed with Claire at seventeen, Ran didn’t know; yet its deterrent value on the woman she was now, at forty-two, was clear to him: the answer being none at all, and maybe somewhat less.

  And what would Ransom do if it was true? Return to New York City and the cab? Pick up his dinner at the Korean deli salad bar on the way back from the garage each night? Take it home to the empty apartment? Drink too much wine while Maria Callas sang “Vissi d’arte” in the background, or listen to CDs—Neutral Milk Hotel and Manitoba, Cannibal Ox, the Wrens, this month’s crop of hot young bands, kids with talent, prepared to bleed, knowing in his heart that they were now where he and RHB were then, thinking they were going to be the Beatles or the Stones, knowing, unlike them, that it would never happen. To return to that small, bitter life without the dream of love and family that had sustained him through the last few months…Ransom didn’t know how he could face it, if he would.

  Deep inside him, something Ran had never felt before, or not in a long time, began to stir. It was like a seismic tremor, like a trembling in the rails, like the coils of a great snake thrashing awake after a long sleep, and all these things—snake, volcano, locomotive—were one thing: rage, the rage of one who, all his life, had tried to give his best—to his music, his marriage, his family and, not least, his wife—only to find his best was not enough. Wasn’t good enough.

  Gripping the edge of the cold slab, Ran looked down at the chisel marks the slantlight of the moon had filled with fresh black ink….

  CAPT. HARLAN P. DELAY

  21ST SOUTH CAROLINA, C.S. A.b. Dec. 8, 1820 d. September 1, 1863

  Fallen in Defense of Home and Country

  Resting Now in Patient Hope

  Of Resurrection

  Wasn’t he the one—the name tugged at Ransom’s memory—the one from Claire’s story, who came home from the war and disappeared with Adelaide, his wife? How, then, did he come to be here? Ran’s first thought was that there was some mix-up. Then the answer dawned. There was no one here, nobody in this tomb. No body. Adelaide had buried him—must have—when he was listed killed in action. Then he came home, and…what? Walked into the park one afternoon, into the dappled light that fell through the old oaks and magnolias, and found his own name on the new tombstone in the family plot. And what would that be like, Ran wondered, to come home from some Northern prison, after years of suffering and privation, to find your wife has grieved and buried you and moved on with her life?

  At the sound of footsteps, a faint, wet quashing on the rain-soaked ground, he turned, but there was nobody there. No body.

  The kitchen screen slammed at the house, and suddenly there were voices, real ones, on the porch.

  “Ransom? Oh, Ran-som?”

  He recognized the tipsy humor in her voice and started to answer, then didn’t as Marcel came out.

  “Where do you suppose he is?”

  “No idea.”

  “Out giving his new broomstick a spin?”

  “I wouldn’t rule it out.”

  “Maybe he and Nightmare, his trusty steed, are taking a midnight gambol around the fence lines.”

  “Also possible,” said Cell, following her down the steps into the drive.

  “I hate it when you humor me.”

  “Is that what I’m doing?”

  “Yes,” she said, turning toward him at his car, “it is. After thirty years, I ought to know.”

  “I guess you should.” Cell left a silent beat before he asked, “Will you be okay?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it, Cell.”

  “I had a nice time.”

  “Vodou pots and all?”

  “Vodou pots and all.”

  “Well, you’re a liar, but a pretty nice one.”

  “I’m glad you think so. It was interesting.”

  “Interesting…Uh-huh.”

  Ran expected them to laugh, but neither did. He took the moment hard, the next one even harder….

  “I guess I’ll see you in the morning then.” Marcel stood, expectantly, beside his open door, as though their business remained to be concluded.

  “I guess you will.” Looking up at him, Claire cradled her arms across her front, something she did when she was cold. The gesture somehow made her young.

  Ransom watched this like a dream, a spell, a hologram of people long dead or not yet born sent forward or back through time to enact some fateful moment long concluded or still to come. Then Claire rocked up on her tiptoes and simply kissed his cheek.

  “Good night,” she said, and he climbed in.

  She watched his brake lights flash and dim in the allée and went inside, and Ran got up and followed her; through the door, down the hall, up the grand staircase, beneath the chandelier on its fifty pounds of sterling links. The portraits of the ancestors looked down on him, unsmiling, a jury, not of his peers.

  What are you going to do? the voice inside him asked.

  “Just talk,” he said, annoyed at its disingenuous alarm. As if there were any question of something other, something more.

  The dead De
Lays regarded his upward progress with suspicion and did not seem reassured.

  The upstairs hall was dark, and the bathroom door was parted. Standing just outside, Ransom listened to the iron ring of rain in the old tub, then pushed the door. A cloud of warm mist billowed toward him, then he saw her through the bloom of condensation on the transparent shower curtain. Her body was white, but not really—really, there were shades of ivory, pinks, soft yellows, brown hair up and down. Her nipples and her lips were different strokes of the same brush, a slash less red than umber, a period stabbed home, and twisted.

  “Claire?”

  She didn’t hear.

  “Claire?”

  Still nothing.

  “Claire!”

  She jumped. “Shit, Ransom!” She poked her face though the curtain. “Who are you, the midnight rambler? Where did you go?”

  Out for a midnight gambol with Nightmare, my trusty steed, the voice suggested. He vetoed the proposal. “I took a walk,” he said. “I think we need to talk….”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  What is there to say?” she asks him in the bedroom. “I saw you kiss her mouth. I saw Clarisse kiss you. Unless you can persuade me to disregard the evidence of my own senses, my two eyes…”

  “I can’t,” says Harlan. “I don’t intend to try. You saw what you saw, and I regret what you saw. I regret the pain I’ve caused. But I must tell you, Addie, you don’t understand what you saw. You don’t begin to understand….”

  “What don’t I understand?” she interrupts. “Is it your intention to have a Negro mistress in the cottage and a white wife at the house? Did you expect me to consent to such arrangements?”

  “That is not my intention, madam. It has never been my intention. You are groping in the dark. You are miles from a true understanding of the case. If you’ll attempt to calm yourself and let me speak, I will explain. If, when I conclude, you wish to leave, I won’t stand in your way. My hope, though, Addie, my fervent hope, is otherwise. My hope is that you’ll stand by me and fight for me, as I intend to stand and fight for you. Despite appearances, I’m fighting for you now.”