by David Payne
“No, niña, it is how they acted when they learned—that is what there is to blame them for.”
This swift, cutting intuition, Addie thinks, Jarry got that from her.
“What is it you came to ask?”
“I was thinking of the clothes we lost. We can speak of it another time.”
“What about them?”
“I wondered if we might not do some sewing here. I can knit, and I thought that we—or I—could perhaps begin with a new set of stockings for the crop hands, then—”
“Yes,” Paloma cuts her off, “in the old days, not so many years ago, before the cloth from England and the Northern mills got cheap, we did that on the place. But, niña, there are four hundred people here. That is eight hundred stockings, eight hundred feet.”
“But it cannot take so long, can it?” says Addie. “A single sock?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps.” Paloma seems unable, after all, to keep her concentration fixed on this, and they are silent as the water finds the channeled ribs, rills along the door edge, drips onto the floor.
Dipping the sponge, Addie feels something on the bottom of the basin and lifts out a length of dripping chain. She meets Paloma’s gaze and blinks.
“Do you know why the top and bottom links are broken?” the old woman asks.
“Why?”
“To unloose, niña. You break the chain to set them free.”
“And the herbs?”
“The rue is what you smell. There’s agrimony in it. Other things.”
“It is Cuban?”
“Cuban? No, I learned it on this place, right here, when I was just about your age—no, even younger. When I first came, I knew no one but Percival. Everything was strange to me. I was grieving for my country and my child. An old woman, Binah, taught me things. There’s hyssop in it, too. ‘Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be whiter than snow.’”
“That’s from the Psalms.”
“Yes, Fifty-one. That is what you say when you’ve brought evil on yourself through your own acts, or for another who has done so. Thirty-seven, if you’re innocently wronged. Binah taught me this, and that you put the broken chain into the bath and stroke the body downward toward the feet and burn the candles upside down. All of it is to clean, to wash away, to protect and to reverse.”
“To reverse what?”
Paloma’s solemn face goes still more solemn now. “That, niña…that is what I do not know. There is something, though.” She juts her chin toward the corpse. “Look at him. Can you not see the trouble in his face? He’s troubled in his spirit, too. He has not gone. I feel him somewhere close.”
There is gooseflesh, suddenly, on Addie’s arms.
“He’s in a dark place, calling out. He’s trying to tell me where he is, and I want to help him—that’s why I set these lights and made the wash. But I’m angry, too. So angry, niña. I don’t know whether he’s betrayed us, or if we’ve been deceived.”
The older woman’s scrutiny is now so close and fierce that Addie feels the blood rush to her cheeks.
“It is hard, niña,” Paloma says, “very hard, at such a time as this, not to know the truth. And what is hard for me, for Jarry is harder still. You yourself, I think, know something about this.”
It is all Addie can do to hold Paloma’s stare and pray that her eyes, ill-suited to concealment, do not betray her. “How is he?” she asks, subdued.
“He’s not himself. But God sends him busy-ness to spare him grief.”
Addie wrings the sponge and stares down at the corpse, feeling wrung and twisted up herself. In such matters, her background has left no area of gray. But she has left the sunny path. She’s in the woods. This is the moment Addie recognizes she has lost her way. “You’re free, Paloma. Harlan told me so upstairs just now.”
“And my son?”
“We can’t do without him, Paloma. But Harlan thinks the war may well be done by summertime.”
“And if it lasts ten years?”
“What am I to do?” asks Addie in frustration. “Do you expect me to step off the boat and start to tell my husband what to do?”
“No, niña, that is not what I expect of you.”
“Even if there were a will,” says Addie, “even if it freed him now, today, as you desire, it would make no difference. Harlan would oppose it in the courts, and he’d still have to stay. So, you see, it really makes no difference…You do see this, don’t you?”
Paloma shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter how long the war lasts, niña—if it lasts till all of us are dead or just one day. What matters to Jarry is what his father said to him in his last act. The worst thing about slavery, do you know what it is? I will tell you, niña. When you put a man in chains, you not only steal his body, you steal from him the truth of who he is.”
“How does slavery do that?” asks Addie, with a trace of heat. “No, I don’t see that, Paloma. It seems to me, you’ve both been treated fairly, and, in fact, quite well.”
“I will tell you how,” she says. “If you have two children, two sons, and say to one, ‘You are my child, you are a human being, when you grow up you will be a man like me,’ and to the other you say, ‘You are an animal, when you grow up I will put the bit into your mouth and hitch you to the cart and make you pull.’…The first thing that will happen is that second child, if he is strong like Jarry, will resist you, he’ll rebel. But if his own father tells him this, the person he loves most and most respects, then that child’s heart will break, he’ll be destroyed, all but the strongest, and sometimes even they. This is how, niña, do you see? First you steal his body, then you steal the truth of who he is, that he is human, and when you’ve taken that, he cannot love himself. And when he cannot love himself, he cannot love you either, cannot love others or another, and when that’s done, then you have taken his humanity. Then he becomes an animal, in truth, and worse, far worse. Because an animal, even a wolf, is innocent, but a man who’s lost this no longer has a human soul, and when the soul is gone, then he is capable of any evil. He is capable of anything. I fought to keep my son from this, and I succeeded all these years. Now Percival has broken his last promise, and I’m afraid for Jarry, but who I fear for still more is Clarisse. Percival has brought this down on all of us, and even more so on himself.”
“You’re hard on him, Paloma,” Addie says, “too hard, I think. He loved you, loved you deeply. When I saw him yesterday, he told me so himself. Practically the last thing he said was that he loved you better than he had his wife.”
Paloma is thoughtful over this. “There was a time, perhaps, when that was true—a few months or weeks in the beginning…. It was all so long ago. I remember it, but not how long it lasts. What I remember best is Percival sitting by the bed where we had been, reading poetry to me in English. I didn’t understand the words, but I loved the music of his voice and how his face would change. One minute he would frown, and then a smile would break, he’d hold a finger up like this as if to warn or promise what the coming line would be. It was like sunlight, niña, the way it filters through the branches of a tree…. Jarry got this from his father. And he is still beautiful.” She gazes, frowning, at the corpse. “He is still beautiful, isn’t he?”
“He is, Paloma,” Addie says with sympathy.
“But this all ended, you see.”
“When he didn’t free you…”
Paloma shakes her head. “No, it wasn’t that. We never spoke of freedom. It seems naive and foolish now, but I felt already free. I felt that, in his heart, Percival had already granted this to me, and, more than that, I felt that I had granted it to him, the same. And, by this, I mean a different, higher sort of freedom, niña, one that neither of us possessed until we found it through each other. We were equal, Percival in need like me, and we both gave and both received. And so, to speak about this other freedom, niña, to speak about the legal thing, the fact that he still held my deed, this would have felt like an embarrassment. We were here.” Paloma holds her ha
nd at the level of her brow. “And to speak about the other…” She drops it to the level of her breast. “Do you see? It would be like church, if you were discussing your wedding with the priest, talking of your joy and future happiness in life…. To then stop and ask him, how much, Padre, is this going to cost? This would be a smallness, no? So it seemed to me.” She stops and looks away.
“Now there were others in the templo who felt differently. Percival, then, you understand was more Kimbisa than the Kimbiseros—he was on fire with Palo. And if he was sincere, they felt, this blanco, then he ought to free his woman, oughtn’t he? Demetrio, our padrino, spoke to him of it, and Percival heard him out respectfully, but then he went his way and nothing changed. Finally it was the santos who placed him under this command. It was San Luis Beltrán speaking through Andrés Petit. But, me, niña, I never asked for freedom. The only thing I ever asked for was Clarisse.”
Addie’s expression slackens. “Clarisse…”
“This is what you haven’t grasped. I asked him for my child. Clarisse was three months old, niña, three months, when she was taken from my breast.”
“But it was Villa-Urrutia, I thought. Didn’t Villa-Urrutia do that?”
“Wenceslao asked for her, but it was Percival who enforced his claim. I begged him not to give her back. What difference did it make to that old man? He only wanted her to punish us.”
“For what?”
“For what? Because he lost the game. Because Percival won. Because he wanted me, and I was gone.”
“But that wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t even by your choice.”
Paloma laughs. “What of that? Are you shocked that Wenceslao was cruel? That he was unjust? So what if he was, the Conde was still angry and someone had to pay. He couldn’t punish Percival, and who was left? So he punished me by taking the one thing I wanted most, and Percival—this man who you say loved me better than his wife—allowed it. That was what I asked him for, not freedom. What is freedom? A word. The only freedom that meant anything to me was to be a mother to my child.”
“Oh, Paloma. I didn’t see.”
“No, you didn’t see. Nor did Percival. But it is just this seeing, niña—this, to me, is what love is, the greater part of it. There is in each of us one deep, last place. To truly love another is to see him there, to see him as he sees himself, and hold him, hold his differentness in the same tender care with which you hold yourself. Had Percival seen and loved me in that way, how could he have done this? Had I been white like you, all Cuba would have risen to defend me. The ministers would have thundered from the pulpits. Armies would have marched into the field. But for a pardo slave to lose a child—this happened fifty times a day. Who was there to grieve but me? Binah was the only one.”
“I’m shocked that Percival allowed this.”
“He tried to buy her back—I give him that—but to Wenceslao, the meanness was sweeter than the price. When he refused, that was the end of it.”
“But what else could Percival have done?”
“What else? We could simply have climbed aboard the ship and sailed away with her, and what could Wenceslao have done? He would have stamped and fumed and been over it by nightfall. Would a man not do this for a woman that he loved, a husband for his wife? But, no, niña, Percival was a gentleman. To welsh on a gambling debt to another caballero? Unthinkable. So, being true to honor, he took my daughter—his own child—away from me. Would he have done this to Melissa? Never, niña. Never in a thousand years. No, if he had loved me as he said, Clarisse would have come with us to South Carolina. She’d have grown up in this house with her two brothers. She and Harlan would have looked into each other’s eyes a hundred times a day. And if this had happened, niña…do you see? You wouldn’t suffer what you suffer now. Nor would Jarry. Percival would have married me, and Jarry would have grown up free. But these things, they were not to be, no, por donde salta la madre, salta la hija…. Where the mother leads, the daughter follow—so in my old country it is said—and hijo de gato ratón caza, the cat’s son chase the rat. You see how it turns out. For Clarisse with Harlan, it is just the same as Percival and me. Now it has touched you, too. It is all fruit, fruit of the poison tree. And it isn’t over yet. No, I look into your eyes this morning, I look into this old man’s face and see the trouble there, and fear that we have not seen the beginning of the worst.”
“Do you mean to frighten me?”
“It isn’t me you need to fear.”
“Do I need to fear Clarisse?”
Paloma’s face takes an obstreperous set.
“Harlan thinks we’ve been bewitched.”
“What is it to me what Harlan thinks?”
“Did Jarry tell you what I saw?”
“He told me what you said you saw.”
“You don’t believe me?”
Paloma looks toward the window now. “I don’t know what I believe. I only know there cannot be a prenda here. It makes no sense.”
“I don’t know what a prenda is.”
“And you don’t need to know.”
“But my locket, Paloma,” she protests, “the one I gave Harlan for our engagement—I saw it there. A knife was driven through the hinge. And the plate that had the leeches on it. Who else could have put them there except Clarisse?”
Paloma’s eyes are furred and hot. “Do you understand what you are saying? You’re telling me she is a bruja, niña. You’re telling me my daughter is a witch. I’ve looked into her eyes, I’ve asked, and she says she knows nothing of these things. Whose word am I to take—yours, or my own child’s?”
“Then whose else could it be? I know what I saw, Paloma.”
“I only know it cannot be Clarisse’s. For her to do this, to make a prenda—even if she knew how, and where would she have learned?—for any woman not yet past the change to do this would be to risk her life, and more than that. Much more than her life. It would be to damn herself. Why, niña? Why would she do this? No, this I will not believe. Clarisse would not break regla.”
“What is regla?”
“Regla, niña? Regla is order, proper order. There is regla in a house, a land, between two people, you and me, a mistress and a slave, between parents and children, between a woman and a man. There is also regla between us and them”—she points her chin toward Percival—“between the living and the dead. When it’s broken, niña, nothing can go right. The nfumbis and nkisis give us a chance to make repair, sometimes only hours. Percival was given years and never did make right. Now he’s died and left us with his mess. And it’s not just Percival. This war that’s coming—that is what I think it is. Long ago, in Africa and Europe, regla was broken by our kings, who sold their people, and yours, who bought the slaves. Many of my people have lost faith along the way. They think slavery is proof our gods are weak and lower than your God, but what I think, niña, what in my heart I believe, is the nkisis left it up to us, and now the time is past. Now they are tired and angry. We have failed to make regla, and they are coming to administer it, they are on us even now. Because, you see, niña, we have one chance, however long or brief, to make repair in love and gentleness, but if we let it pass, they come in blood and fire…. Now when I hear that there are armies raised to north and south, I fear the spirits are coming to make regla in this nation. I hear you’ve seen a prenda in the woods and fear they’re coming to make regla in this house.”
“What do you want from me, Paloma? I mean no harm to you or yours, but I can do only what’s in my power.”
“The truth is in your power, isn’t it? That is what I want from you, niña, and all I want. Before you accuse my daughter, look into your own heart. If Percival is innocent and you know the truth, don’t let us put him in the grave, accused. If Harlan’s lie hurt you, spare me and Jarry what was done to you. We’re human, too. Help us, niña. If you will, then I’ll help you.”
And whom do I betray? thinks Addie. Do I tell her and betray my husband? Or do I keep the secret and betray Paloma, Jarry, Pe
rcival, myself? It’s strange to her how clear the answer is….
“I understand your disappointments, Paloma,” she says, wringing out the sponge and putting it beside the body on the board. Her face has taken on the melancholy cast it wore as she watched the oarsmen and the parakeets vanish in the Nina’s wake. “I wish I could give you what you want and all you want, but I’ve told you everything I can. All I can do now is strive to be as good a mistress as I can. To that end, I intend to start right now, today, to make arrangements for new clothes so people in the quarters can be comfortable, at least.”
Paloma studies her for a long beat. “Bueno, child, que así sea,” she says, and as Addie makes her way toward the door, the old woman grips her wrist. “Just remember, niña, there is also regla in the self.”
Addie merely blinks and makes no answer, and in this moment it is as if the older woman has receded behind a wall of glass.
Reverend Hilliard is a thin, bald man with an ascetic face and steel-rimmed spectacles that seem at odds with lavish vestments. From the Book of Common Prayer, he reads the Burial of the Dead to those lately assembled on the shore of the black pond, under the cypress, and to those already here, beneath the mossy stones, who’ve heard the words before.
“‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts. Shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer….’”
As he reads, Addie’s gaze drifts over the small crowd to Paloma, and to Jarry at her side. Clarisse is absent, and Addie wonders at this briefly, but it’s Jarry’s face that occupies her thoughts. His head is bowed, and he looks fretful and intense. His collar and clothes are disarranged, as if he’s slept in them, if he has slept at all. His eyes are red, and he looks drunk or slightly mad.
“‘Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and most merciful Savior, thou most worthy Judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.’”
Moving in a kind of dream, she watches Harlan throw his clod of earth and throws her own. In a kind of dream, she takes the white musk rose he breaks from Jarry’s climber, holds the stem as Harlan kisses her, and mounts his horse.