Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  “Then it’s possible.”

  “There are unnatural illnesses, yes. And there are also natural illnesses that are caused unnaturally.”

  “That thing I saw in the swamp…Your mother said it’s called a prenda. Tell me what that is.”

  Something veils itself in his expression now. He gets up and paces to the window. “I’m hesitant to speak of that.”

  “Paloma didn’t believe it was there at all.”

  “You’re mistaken,” Jarry says, and now he turns to her, grave-faced. “What’s hard for Mother is to accept what it would mean.”

  “And you?”

  “I don’t believe a lie is in your character.”

  Addie blushes now. “Don’t think me better than I am.”

  “I’ll think well of you until you give me reason to do otherwise. And even if you had some motive to deceive, how would you know what a prenda is, even to describe one? You could never make up such a thing. Mother knows that just as well as I.”

  “It is some implement of witchcraft….”

  “No,” he answers, frowning. “No, it would be a mistake to think of it that way. Father told you something about Palo.”

  “He said it’s used for good, for healings and exorcisms.”

  “If you’re good, the prenda works for good. If not…” He leaves her to draw the inference. “A prenda, in some ways, is like a gun. On this river there are, what, a hundred families? Each one owns a gun. The husband uses it to puts food on the table, to protect his children and his wife. It’s a tool for life. But if there is just one, one angry man with bad intentions in his heart, he points that gun at you and pulls the trigger, you are dead. That’s how a prenda is. It’s exactly like a gun, in itself neither good nor bad. What makes it so is what is in the Palero’s heart.”

  Addie reaches out and grips his arm. “And Clarisse’s heart? She hates me, doesn’t she?”

  “You have everything she thinks should be hers by right.”

  “But I don’t even want it, Jarry—don’t you see?”

  “So you have, for nothing, everything she wants and will never have at any price? Do you imagine that absolves you in her sight?”

  They stare into each other’s eyes with an openness that’s like the swamp, only what was sweet that morning is now an agony to her. The secret she holds over him is like a thorn in Addie’s flesh; she wants nothing more than to pluck it out, but can’t.

  “But your story,” she says. “You were telling me about when you and Thomas left.”

  “Our adventure failed.”

  “So I gathered. What happened?”

  He measures her and sits back in the chair. “We took a piragua from the boathouse—two, actually. The first we set adrift and let the current carry it downstream for them to find. The second, we paddled upriver all night past Society Hill. At dawn, we pulled to the bank and broke the bottom out with stones and sank it. We heard the dogs barking that day, but it was far off and confused. There was no scent for them to find. So we hid and slept till nightfall and set out again.

  “We traveled for six nights up past Cheraw and into North Carolina, where the Pee Dee turns into the Yadkin, and we both felt this quiet excitement growing. We thought we’d made it, and it was on the seventh morning, right at dawn, as we were standing in the shallows, washing up, that they found us. We never heard them come. They were just there, on the embankment above us, two bearded men in hats, on mules, with rifles scabbarded. For a moment, I thought maybe they were just chance travelers, but then one of them said, ‘Looks like you boys have had your fun…. It’s time to head on home.’ He smiled and spat tobacco juice, and the other one unsleeved his gun. Thomas shoved me toward the shore and started backing out toward deeper water, and the man said, ‘Nigger, stop right where you at,’ and Thomas looked at me—he was smiling—and he said, ‘Whah our mammy fotch us up?’ And he let out a yell and turned and dove. ‘Goddamn, stupid nigger,’ the man said, and then I heard the gun echo off the bluff. The first shot caught him in his shoulder blade, and Thomas kept on swimming, weakly, with one arm. The second bullet hit him in the head. He stopped then, and the current rolled him over. His eyes were open, and his mouth filled up with water, and he sank.”

  “Oh, Jarry.” Addie reaches out and puts her hand on his balled fist. Though he doesn’t unclench it, for this moment the abyss between them shrinks to the distance between her bed and the chair. But as she looks into his face, at Jarry’s honest pain, the falsity of her position looms.

  “They brought me home behind the mules,” he continues, “trotting with a rope around my neck. In the infirmary, I broke a water glass and cut my wrists”—he shows her now the scars he hid before—“but Mother found me and stanched the bleeding. The second time, I strung a rope from the library chandelier and stepped off the partners desk. I wanted Father to be the one to find me. I wanted to fix that image in his mind. That time, he cut me down himself. When I came to, I found him pacing. That was when he finally looked at me. ‘Tell me why you want to do this to your mother,’ he said. ‘Tell me why you want to do this to yourself.’

  “‘Because a man like you can take the life of one like Thomas and then sit down to supper as though nothing happened and God allows it,’ I said.

  “‘I didn’t authorize those men to do what they did, Jarry,’ Father said. ‘They said they gave him every chance to surrender, but he turned and swam.’

  “‘He turned and swam because he was a man.’ I shouted it. ‘A man. That’s what they killed him for. His blood is on your hands. And I’ll never forgive you for it. Never.’ Those bastards,” Jarry says, no longer repeating what he told his father now, but speaking straight to her. “They should have fallen to their knees and worshipped him for what he did, for showing them such courage and humanity. Instead they shot h—” He bites down hard on what he feels. “Instead, they shot him in the head and watched him sink.”

  “So Percival saw who you were.”

  Jarry frowns and looks away. “I don’t know what he saw.”

  “No, he could not have failed to see. I know, because I see the same thing now myself.”

  He holds her stare and doesn’t contradict. “What is it?” he asks suddenly. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t…know,” she answers, panting. Her eyes are round and large, too large for her face; she’s trembling, too—hands, shoulders, her whole body now.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Through an open window, Ran could hear the buzzer’s persecuting whine, mosquitolike, upstairs in Tildy’s old white house. As he cast a backward glance toward Alberta and the kids, he thought, despairingly, she might be out. But then the curtain moved, and soon he heard the tread of crepe-soled feet. The door opened and Della—the maid Claire called her “dah”—stared out.

  “Mister Ransom,” she said, with no suggestion of surprise, no affect of any kind…. Mustuh Ransom, in that drawling voice he’d always loved, slow, lugubrious, yet droll.

  “Hello, Della,” he said, smiling despite everything. “Aunt Tildy home?”

  “Miss Tildy’s upstairs in the parlor.” The pollah, Della said, incidentally correcting him and giving him a subtle warning. “Aunt” had never been conceded to the upstart North Carolina boy who’d married Miss Claire. Ransom failed to take the hint.

  “Step this way.”

  Opening the big black brass-knobbed door, Della led him down the piazza to the entry in the middle of the ground-floor porch. Inside, in sepia light, they passed beneath the old gas chandelier in the front hall—a Philadelphia piece of bronze and ormolu, as convoluted and baroque, Ran had always thought, as the pipe organ in Nemo’s antechamber. He especially loved the globes of frosted glass etched with sheaves of rice, betokening what, once upon a time, had paid for it. Past Piranesi engravings of Italian scenes—brought back by dead ancestors from grand tours long forgotten—they proceeded up the stairs to the West Parlor, also called the Music Room, which contained the pianoforte on which Adelaide Huge
r once entertained her future husband, accompanying herself, as she sang Thomas More’s rendition of “She Walks in Beauty Like the Night,” the sheet music of which lay, yellowed but otherwise undisturbed, in the compartment of the bench.

  Outfitted in the ceremonial dress and coif of a prior era, Miss Matilda sat between this instrument and an eighteenth-century harp, constructed in London by Sebastian Erard, a wizened Euterpe, her palsied hands resting on a silver-headed cane.

  “Long time, no see, Aunt T,” said Ran as Della softly closed the pocket doors and vanished. “Good to see you.”

  Tildy appraised him with a rheumy eye as cold and dark as the bull’s-eye mirror in the girandole above the mantelpiece. “I wish I could reciprocate yo’ sentiment.”

  Ran, in light of history, was not expecting a parade; nonetheless, this greeting stung. “Okay, no light banter. I get it. Ground rules established.” He allowed himself to smile.

  Tildy, pointedly, did not. “No news in years has heartened me mo’ than hearing Claire had finally left you and come home to Clive’s,” she said, in her gloomy, sonorous old drawl, “where she belongs; nor any disheartened me as much as hearing you’d returned to suck that poor child’s lifeblood once again. When do you intend to let her go? Not, I suppose, till you’ve extracted the last dram and left her nothing but a husk.”

  “Come on, Aunt Tildy, that’s a little harsh, don’t you think?” he said, preserving his smile with effort—refusing, rather, to give her the satisfaction of defeating it. But it was dire, and as Ran direly smiled, he thought, You hateful, shriveled-up old witch, what do you know about marriage—mine, ours, anyone’s?

  “And I am not yo’ aunt,” Tildy added, giving the knife an extra twist.

  Gravity now prevailed in Ransom’s face. Crossing, uninvited, to the window, he pulled back the curtain and looked.

  Wearing a sweetgrass helmet, Charlie was in animated conversation with Alberta, who stood, arms akimbo, clearly charmed. Hope, meanwhile, held apart, gazing up at the window, puzzling out the terms. They were both okay. They were who they were. The problem was the situation he had placed them in. The problem, Ransom realized, was him.

  A minstrel… The phrase popped suddenly into his head. “We’ve had lawyers, planters, governors, diplomats,” Clive had said to Ran at their first meeting, not long after the engagement was announced, “but it’s taken our people a long time to rate a minstrel in the family.” And his eyes—his bright, narrow, happy, entitled, avian old eyes—gloated on their small, mean victory, before Clive turned away, putting Ran to death. He’d been at the zenith then—Ran hadn’t recognized it as the top, of course, but, looking back, it was. “Talking in My Sleep” was winning airtime in every major urban market in the country; they’d been nominated for a Grammy. Growing up in Bagtown, being Mel Hill’s son—he’d put all that behind him, or thought he had, till Clive, in a single second, with a single word, sent him plummeting right back. Like his sister Tildy seemed intent on doing now.

  “Don’t let her get to you,” he whispered to himself, aloud. But the voice said, Oh, go ahead and let the old bitch have it—it might even do her good. You know damn well if she’d ever gotten fucked, if she’d loosened up that much, just once, she wouldn’t have turned into such a spiteful, raisin-faced old judge and monster. Give her a dose of her own meds—a bog-Irish car bomb with a lithium chaser on the side.

  “Shut up,” Ran said, no longer fully sotto voce. Across the street from Hope, a man came out of a house and reached into his pocket…. Beep, beep. It was only a remote, thank God. Thank God! The trunk of a Mercedes popped.

  “What?” Tildy demanded as he muttered to himself. “What did you say to me?”

  When he turned, Ran’s expression had left the artificial country of goodwill. “Look, Tildy, Miss DeLay, whatever I’m supposed to call you after nineteen years, I’m not here to fight.”

  “Why are you here?” she demanded, imperious and unmoved.

  “Because this morning two dead bodies turned up at Wando Passo, buried in shallow graves.”

  Tildy blinked and blinked again. “So they’ve finally found them.”

  “Found who?”

  “Harlan and Adelaide DeLay.”

  His jaw flexed. “We’re on the same wavelength, then. He died from a gunshot to the head. She may have been shot, too. They’re taking the remains to Columbia to examine them.”

  “God, rest them. God, rest their souls.” Tildy, for the first time, looked away. “Claire should be telling me this, not you. Why isn’t she?”

  “She was at school when it happened. She still doesn’t know. I drove straight here after I talked to the police.”

  “Why?” Tildy demanded.

  “Why? Because I want to know what happened to them. I want to know what you know.”

  “Then you’ve driven a long way for nothing. The records from Wando Passo were destroyed when Grandfather’s law office burned in the Great Earthquake.”

  “There must be stories….”

  “Very few. Mother believed they went to Cuba. She said Harlan came back from the war”—waw, she said—“destitute and broken. They couldn’t make a go, so they ran away, like Keats’s lovers. ‘Aye, ages long ago, These lovers fled away into the storm.’ I don’t suppose you know ‘St. Agnes.’”

  “No, but I’d say we can rule that theory out.”

  “Mother’s temperament ran to the romantic. Daddy”—Deaddy, she said—“believed the nigras did it.”

  “The ‘nigras’?” Ran couldn’t help himself.

  Tildy glared. “I suppose you find it ironic, the way I refer to the colo’eds. I am a product of my time and place, as are you, Ransom Hill, whether or not you have the wit to recognize the fact. What you’ve said turns my suspicions toward the husband.”

  “Harlan.”

  “Harlan. Though he came from money, he was the upstart in that marriage—not unlike yourself.”

  “You aren’t going to give up, are you?” Ransom said. “You’re hell-bent and determined to get a rise from me.”

  “I’m determined to say what I believe,” she answered. “If I were a man, and younger, I’d rise out of this chair right now and thrash you within an inch of your life for what you’ve done to Claire and those poor children. I’d send you back to North Carolina with your tail between your legs and make you crawl back under whatever ill-favored rock it was that you were spawned beneath. So help me God, if I were a man, and young, I would.”

  “If you were a man, and young,” said Ran, his shirtfront rising and falling, as he panted shallowly, “I guess we’d see.”

  She got him, though, with the allusion to the kids. Pulling back the paper cambric sheer, he checked again. The man with the remote was loading a suitcase into the Benz. A Charleston type, in his midthirties, he had thick, dark hair, perfectly groomed, with a first distinguished touch of frost at the temples, and wore a black cashmere sweater with gray flannel pants and shoes of some gleaming, welted skin. They were tassel-loafers—Ran had always hated tassel-loafers. That’s who they wanted, Ransom thought, that’s who they wanted for Miss Claire. This guy was supposed to be Hope and Charlie’s father.

  “Why?” he asked, and then he turned. “Why would he have killed her, Tildy?”

  “Why?” she fumed. “Why do husbands ever terrorize and kill their wives? Since when was an excuse required? They do so because they poison the well from which love springs and then expect the water to be pure. They expect women to love them like their mamas did—or didn’t—then test that love with outrageous behavior till they succeed in driving it away; when they have, they then set out to wreak vengeance on their ‘betrayal’—isn’t that the way of it? You, I should think, would have consid’able insight into the phenomenon.”

  An ominous calm stole over Ransom. “I know you never approved our marriage, Tildy.”

  “I made no secret of the fact.”

  “You never thought I was good enough for Claire.”

&nbs
p; “In a word, no, I did not. And do not now.”

  Ran stared and began to nod. “You know what, Tildy? At my worst, when I was sick, I’ve feared that, too. Standing here right now, I fear it still. But at my best, and not even that—when I was just my normal weekday self—I’ve always believed I was good enough for Claire, and, in fact, I think she did right well by me. And if I’m good enough for her, I’m plenty good enough for you and Clive and anybody else. And if you don’t think so, frankly, I don’t give a shit. I always liked the fact that you were a straight shooter, but, beyond that, I never liked you that much either. I find you tight-assed, punitive, and colder than the winter wind in Buffalo. Most of all, I think you’re puffed up with specious pride over something you did nothing for, and what does it amount to, Tildy? A name, a houseful of nineteenth-century antiques…Who really gives a shit but you?”

  “What I’ve done, Ransom Hill,” she said, “that I’m proud of, is to bear that name, honorably, for almost ninety years. And there are no—or precious few—nineteenth-century antiques here, sir. That chair, for example—the one you’re presently soiling with your hand—is English Chippendale, from the third quarter of the eighteenth century. It—or its identical mate—may be viewed in The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker’s Director. Among the few nineteenth-century pieces I own is the gasolier downstairs, which was installed when the house was piped for gas in 1846. I’ve heard you wax lyrical about the rice sheaves on the globes a dozen times, but to me it is an abomination, a crass allusion to the family wealth. My people were capable of such a lapse in taste, but they were gentlemen and ladies, nonetheless, even then. Where were yours in 1846?”

  Tildy left a pause, but not enough of one for him to answer—if he’d had an answer.

  “You don’t know, do you? I do, though. In sod houses in the west of Ireland, eating potatoes, with their smutch-faced children running around with lank hair, runny noses, and bare feet, beating each other on the head with sticks. Let me tell you something, Ransom Hill, something you don’t know, because you can’t. It takes three generations, if not four, to make a name, another three or four to make it matter, and three or four from there to get to where I am and where your wife and children are. You, sir, are at the low and sad beginning of that trip. Your father—what was he? A common mill hand. Nothing. And you, in my opinion, have not appreciably advanced. It’s my hope and fervent prayer that your son will be as unlike your side and as much like Claire’s and mine as possible.”