Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  “Daddy,” Hope said, lowering her voice, “I don’t think Mommy—”

  “Mommy’s not here,” he cut her off. “I have to make this call. Alberta’s all right. She’ll take good care of you.”

  Hope looked unconvinced, and Charlie, picking up the vibe, began to cry. Ran looked back and forth between them. “Look, guys,” he said, deciding to come clean, “I won’t lie to you. Something is a little wrong, but I’m on top of it. Daddy’s going to get it fixed, but I need your help for ten or fifteen minutes. Can you give me that?”

  Charlie, snuffling up his tears, merely nodded, prepared to charge whatever hill. “I want ice keem, Doddy.”

  “When I get back, I’ll get you some.”

  “Promise?”

  Ransom crossed his heart.

  Hope, however, didn’t let him off the hook. The look she gave Ransom seared him. It was the look of someone who’s defended you against all comers, who’s called day night for you, and black, white, in the moment she first realizes your detractors were all right.

  “I have to do this, Pete,” he said. And Ransom turned his back.

  THIRTY-ONE

  So Addie works.

  Her first morning alone at Wando Passo, she hurries downstairs, thinking to throw herself into her project, only to find fifteen people waiting on the porch.

  “Good morning. Is there something…”

  “We yeah fuh git de day tas, miss.” The gardener, Peter, looks at her expectantly, holding his doffed cap.

  Her brow creases like a press, attempting to extract essential oil from this. “Forget” is the one word she thinks she gets. “Perhaps you should speak to Jarry….”

  “’E wif de bud mindas cross de ribbah, mistis.” Peter points toward the fields on the far side of the Pee Dee. “Shum, enty?”

  “I’m sorry…”

  “Dey, mistis. Yeddy ’im?” He points to his ear. “Dey dey!” He thrusts his hand in frustrated emphasis.

  Fortunately, at this moment Paloma appears from the trees with two young girls carrying the shallow sweetgrass baskets known as fanners. Normally used to winnow rice, these are presently filled with a silvery-white eider Addie can’t identify.

  “Day tasks” turns out to be the operative phrase, and Addie listens carefully, understanding little, as the old woman sets them all about their work. There is Minda, the head cook, and the gardener, Peter, and Peter’s boy, and the butler, William, and Ancrum, the coachman, and Tenah and Annie, the up-and downstairs maids, and the laundress, Hattie, and two seamstresses, and Jas, the second dining room man, and the scullion, Lem, and Peck and John and Tilly, whose duties Addie fails to grasp, and several others whose names escape on this first pass. Addie can’t comprehend who they all are, or why so many servants are required. And spoken Gullah is a far cry from the version she’s heard Harlan and other Georgetown planters imitate at parties, charming laughing audiences, which frequently included her, with anecdotes about old Quash—frustrated in love and offering the “retort cuddius” to some rival for his sharp-tongued paramour’s affections—at St. Cecelia’s Balls, between the German and the waltz.

  In an effort to make up for the candles they’ve lost—Wando Passo uses thirty dozen every month—Paloma sets the girls to spinning wicks from milkweed down collected in the swamp, and then she turns to Addie with a cool appraisal that calls to mind the word she spoke in private—“regla”—which forevermore will form part of Addie’s core understanding of the world.

  Intimidated by the older woman, Addie keeps their exchange polite, but to a minimum. Feeling isolated and superfluous in her new home, the new mistress throws herself into her stocking project, but the maxim from her MmeTogno days creeps back.

  “A promise broken, hell hath opened…. A promise kept, and hell hath wept….”

  Addie knits in rhythm to the words, a maddening refrain she can’t purge from her thoughts. To make it stop, she counts. There are two hundred stitches to the row. Somewhere shy of two thousand, in the one thousand nine hundred nineties, Addie loses count and must begin again. By lunch on the first day, she—who’s knitted no few infant caps for pregnant Charleston friends—has managed fifty rows; by suppertime, a hundred. Twenty thousand stitches in a single day to make a piece of fabric not quite large enough to cover half her hand. That night, with blurred vision, she reads Mrs. Hamilton on education, wanting to fill her mind with self-improving thoughts, turning the pages with her cramped right hand. On the second day, she picks up her pace and manages a hundred and fifty rows. The first stocking, when it’s done, contains nine hundred rows and has taken seven days of constant work. Like a traveler on a mountain she’s thought to climb with ease, Addie feels the shadow of the peak fall over her and, looking up, begins to grasp how high it truly is. Seven hundred ninety-nine to go. On day thirteen, in mingled triumph and despair, she finishes the mate. Now only three hundred ninety-nine more pairs.

  And it’s on this thirteenth day, toward suppertime, that Addie feels a chill—particularly noticeable in her hands and feet—which she at first writes off to overwork. When Tenah comes to summon her to table, the maid finds Addie wrapped in coverlets and blankets, prostrate on the chaise, her teeth chattering uncontrollably. Paloma comes and lays a warm, dry hand on Addie’s brow, checks the inner lining of her lower eyelid.

  “El paludismo,” she tells her son, and Addie sees the gravity of it in Jarry’s face.

  Sending everybody from the room, Paloma lifts Addie’s nightclothes and loops a string around her waist. This has been dipped in some astringent liquid that smells like turpentine. In it, Paloma ties a knot.

  “What is this for?” asks Addie.

  “It will help,” is all she says.

  The old woman prescribes a tea of branch elder twigs and dogwood berries. Addie finds this soothing, but despite the remedy, within an hour and a half, her chill has passed into a fever that rages through the night. Every inch of Addie’s flesh feels scalded; she writhes and twists, comfortable in no position. She throws the covers off and calls to have the windows raised, though they’re already up. Nor can she quench her thirst, however much she drinks. Finally, toward dawn, the fever breaks. She sweats so heavily, Tenah and Paloma have to change the linen twice. As the crews, still sullen-faced with sleep, board flats to cross the Pee Dee to the fields, Addie finally falls into a torpid sleep.

  When she awakes, it’s late the following afternoon and Dr. Sims is holding her left wrist and staring at his watch. “I understand you spent an evening wandering the swamps two weeks ago, Mrs. DeLay,” he says in a mock-stern tone that instantly braces her. “I strongly disapprove. Most strongly. Your peregrinations have bought you a case of the remittent fever.”

  “Do you mean…?”

  “I mean the ague, madam,” he says, snapping shut the lid and slipping his watch into his waistcoat. “I mean, the country fever. That is what the Negroes and the old folks call it, or used to in the days when people still believed that it was caused by miasmal exudations from the swamp. The most advanced opinion nowadays—here and on the Continent—holds paludal fever to be caused by the spores of noxious plants, which breed from putrefying matter in the swamps. When the vapors rise at dusk, these deadly influences are carried to us and inhaled into the lungs. Our systems can tolerate a certain amount—a man’s more than a woman’s, a Negro’s more than a white’s, a native’s more than a visitor’s. You, regrettably, are susceptible on all three counts. The only known palliative—and, note, I do not say a cure—is sulfate of quinia. Unfortunately, Jarry informs me that Wando Passo’s quinine stores were lost at sea during your outbound trip. I myself, due to the damned blockade—and please excuse my French—have been unable, for a month and more, to procure it for my patients or myself at any price. There may still be some stores in Charleston, but, assuming you can find them, they are sure to cost their weight in gold, and are, in fact, more likely to cost their weight in precious stones. Your aunt, however, given her position, might be able t
o prevail on her connections….”

  “I’m sorry,” Addie says, alarmed, “are you suggesting I repair to Charleston?”

  “I’m suggesting nothing of the kind, madam. I’m suggesting—I am strictly ordering you, in fact—to remain exactly where you are, in bed. If it comes to that, you’ll have to send someone, though I must tell you, the idea of Jarry here, or any Negro, on the roads—which are presently filled with brigands—with a large sum of cash, is a recipe for misadventure.”

  “I’m prepared to go,” he volunteers.

  “It may not come to that,” says Sims. “The disease has several manifestations, not all of which are equally concerning.”

  “Actually, I feel much better now,” she says, gamely sitting up.

  “That, my dear,” says Sims, “is wholly immaterial. The illness follows an invariable pattern—from chills, to fever, to diaphoresis, sometimes called the hot-wet phase, followed, lastly, by a period of remission before the cycle starts again. The key question is the interval. If you go until this time tomorrow without relapse, then you have the less virulent form of the disease, and we can confidently hope to expel the materia morbi from your system with the means at hand, namely emetics, purgatives, and phlebotomy.”

  “And if it recurs before that time?”

  “We shall cross that bridge, my dear, when, and if, we arrive at it. The subtertian or malignant form of the remittent fever is far less common in these parts.”

  “But if it is…what you said.”

  Sims holds her stare. “Then Jarry will set out for Charleston on your fastest horse.”

  “You’re suggesting I might die?”

  “In my experience,” Sims says, “the subtertian or malignant fever, if untreated with quinine, is fatal in four cases out of five.”

  It’s a moment before she fully takes this in. “Thank you,” she says, in a clear tone, with dignity.

  For the first time in the interview, there is a flash of emotion in the physician’s eyes. “I’ll be back in the morning.”

  “You should rest now,” Jarry tells her, after Sims departs.

  “Yes, I know I should. But Jarry…?”

  At the door already, he looks back. “I’ll sit with you,” he says, with the ready intuition she remembers from the swamp. “Shall I read to you?”

  “Would you?”

  He reaches for her Byron on the stand.

  “Not that, though. Not him. You choose for me. I’m so weary of my preferences.”

  He briefly mulls, then leaves the room. As she waits, the male cardinal alights on a stout limb of the oak outside, and Addie watches as he sings.

  “‘There was a roaring in the wind all night,’” Jarry begins,

  “‘The rain came heavily and fell in floods;

  But now the sun is rising calm and bright;

  The birds are singing in the distant woods.’”

  “This is familiar,” she says at the conclusion of the verse. “Is it Wordsworth?”

  “‘Resolution and Independence.’”

  “‘We poets in our youth,’” she says, “‘begin in gladness, / But thereof comes…’ Remind me what it is that comes thereof.”

  “‘But thereof in the end come despondency and madness’…. Yes, those are the lines everyone remembers, but to me, they’re just the fruit on the low branches of the tree.”

  “The low branches…” She gives a languid laugh. “Do you know I found Wordsworth dull at school?”

  “I’d rate him over Byron—by a wide margin, too.”

  At the challenge, Addie smiles. “This is the poem your father read you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And if you hated Percival,” she says, “how did that occur?”

  A shadow crosses Jarry’s brow. “I’m not sure you’d find it a diverting story.”

  “Then tell me an undiverting one….”

  Closing his finger in the book, he rests it on his knee and sits back in his chair. “That was the year I ran away with Thomas.”

  “Who was he?”

  “The smith. He was more a father to me then than Father was.”

  “How did you come to leave?”

  “I was the scullion,” Jarry says, “the same position Lem holds now. Every morning I hauled sand from the river to the kitchen house and scraped the burned muck from the bottom of the pots. Because I was the master’s son, the people in the quarters had a hard time accepting me, while Father himself had barely ever looked at me, except to bid me fetch him this or that. The only place I felt at home was at the forge. Thomas was forty-two, the same age I am now. He used to tell us stories….” And now, it is as if a ray of sun has touched his brow, and Addie’s face, in its reflection, lightens, too. The door that shut upon the memory of their morning in the swamp swings open, and what has come to seem almost a dream to her is not a dream at all.

  “What stories did he tell?”

  “Animal tales, mostly. Brother Rabbit and Brother Wolf.”

  “Do you mean Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox? Lucius used to tell those stories in my aunt’s yard in Charleston.”

  “Up in Cheraw and that way, they tell it with a fox. When my mother was a girl in Cuba, an old Jamaican woman told her the same tales with a spider and a tiger. But the way Thomas always told it, the way it was told here, was with a rabbit and a wolf.”

  “And what did Thomas say?”

  “‘Well, Brother Wolf and Brother Rabbit, they were neighbors….’”

  “No,” she says, “as it was told to you.”

  “In Gullah?” There is something sharp in Jarry’s hesitation, before he decides in her favor. “‘Buh Wolf and Buh Rabbit, dem bin lib nabur,’” he begins. “‘De dry drout come. Water scase. Buh Wolf dig one spring fuh him fuh git water. Buh Rabbit, him too lazy and too scheemy fuh wuk fuh isself. ’E pen pon lib off tarrah people.’”

  “He…depended upon…?”

  “‘Lib off tarrah people.’”

  “Living off…other people?”

  “That’s it,” he says. “‘Ebry day, wen Buh Wolf yent duh watch um,’e slip to Buh Wolf spring, an ’e full him calabash long water and cah um to ’e house fuh cook long and fuh drink. Buh Wolf see Buh Rabbit track, but ’e couldn ketch um, de tief de water—’”1

  “Wait,” she says, sitting up. “This is the tar baby story, isn’t it?”

  Jarry smiles. “You’ve heard it.”

  “Not this way, though. Go on. Please.”

  As Jarry tells the story, Addie thinks about Paul Hayne, who, long ago, used to read to her in French on the upstairs piazza—love poems usually—courting her secretly, as Blanche sat in the music room over her own book, listening through the open window. Jarry, speaking Gullah, is like Paul, but less like him than like the suitor Paul never quite turned out to be, the one whom Addie dreamed about at Mme Togno’s when she read “Evangeline,” who never really came. Yet as likeness is a million miles from being, so Addie is a million miles from the girl who read that poem and dreamed those dreams. She’s grown and married now, and Jarry is, after all, a Negro and could never be her suitor. There’s a period this evening, though, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, when Addie ceases to denominate him in this way—as a “Negro,” a “black man”—any more than she denominates herself as “white” in her own thoughts. The notion of their difference evaporates, and she finds herself listening as she once did to Paul, only Jarry is more beautiful than Paul Hayne ever was. There’s something warmer, more nuanced in his intelligence, and the fatigue that occasionally shows in his expression is exquisite to her, like something painted by a Rembrandt or a Michelangelo. That fatigue has something final in it, that makes her think of how beautiful the world will appear in our last glimpse as we take leave of it. It speaks to a similar fatigue in her that comes from soberly and honestly bearing up the weight of life. Paul, like Harlan, was in flight from that—French poetry, cigars, and Colonel Lay’s rum punch—these were just their chosen stimulants and props. This was the re
ason, finally, that Addie couldn’t give herself to Paul and hasn’t, now, to Harlan, the way she might, if…

  “That’s one of my happiest memories,” Jarry eventually concludes, “sitting at the forge with Thomas. He’d clang some piece of hot iron with the maul, then sip a dipperful of water, and I especially loved the end, when Thomas said, ‘De minnit Buh Rabbit drap in de brier patch,’e cock up ’e tail,’e jump, an holler back to BuhWolf: “Good bye, Budder! Dis de place me mammy fotch me up—dis de place me mammy fotch me up.” An ’e gone befo BuhWolf kin ketch um.’” Thomas would always wink at me and say, ‘An, Buh Jarry, where yuh mammy fotch you up?’ and my part was to answer, ‘Ri’cheer in de swamp, Thomas,’ and he’d say, ‘Me, too, Buddah, ri’cheer, an one day, we gon drap back in the briar-patch, too, enty? Sho nuf, Budder, bof we two gon drap right back.’ He told me that for years. And then, one day, we did.”

  “You went,” she says.

  “We almost made it, too.”

  Having drawn him to this point, Addie almost asks, “What happened? Why didn’t you?” then, catching sight of the cardinal across his shoulder, doesn’t. A heaviness steals over her from no apparent source. Watching the bird sing on the branch, it occurs to Addie that the wall of glass that arose between Paloma and herself has now arisen between her and Jarry, too, and he is singing on the other side, and his song, though not inaudible, has become muted, now, in a way it wasn’t then, that morning in the swamp. And it’s clear to her that Jarry has no chance to penetrate the wall because he cannot see it. Only Addie can. Her secret confers this power over him. To surrender it might shatter the glass wall, and Addie cannot break the wall because…because…But suddenly she can’t remember why this would be wrong, and heaviness gives way to an electric pang of fear.

  “Did Clarisse do this to me?” she asks, with sudden, seeming inconsequence.

  The question takes him by surprise. “I don’t know,” he says eventually. “I don’t think so, but I honestly don’t know.”