Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  “Hey titter, enty you gwine tan one side and lemme git some water? Enty you know me pot duh bun? Enty you know me hurry? Enty you yeddy me tell you fuh mobe?”

  Jarry’s words come back to her, mixing with Paloma’s, who is chanting, “Eshu a ke buru bori ake boye to ri to ru la…Ye fiyo’ ru a’re a la le ku’pa she eyo me’ko…”

  Something soft brushes her face, and Addie opens her eyes to see the roosters’ eyes, tranced and golden, as Paloma, holding them by the feet, their wings relaxed and spread, passes them over her like a soft wind.

  “Jarry?”

  He takes her hand and presses it. “Don’t be frightened,” he whispers.

  And now, when Addie looks at the black figure, the tar baby, which the others address as Lucero, as Nkuyu, as Eshu, it’s regarding her with consciousness in its expression. She is terrified. It suddenly occurs to her that the tar baby stands between her and the spring, and the spring is life.

  “You’re Death, aren’t you?” she asks.

  And the tar baby—Lucero, Nkuyu, Eshu, there are many names—laughs at her. “No, I am not Death,” it says, “I am dead, but I am not Death. I am El Portero. I open the gate.”

  “Am I going to die?”

  “Most certainly.”

  “But I’m not ready.”

  “No one ever is, niña. I myself was not. Life is like a child’s toy you grip with all your might, and then one day you wake and forget your need for it. You let it go, and then you find it in the toy box later, dusty, soiled, and old, and wonder what it was that made you love it so. I was once alive, and that is how life seems to me, like childhood seems to you, a place you think of fondly but have no wish to return to. It will be the same for you.”

  “Please,” pleads Addie. “Please, not now. I want to live before I die. Let me stay a little more.” She clutches Jarry’s hand, as though to moor herself by it.

  Lucero regards her with compassion, the way an adult regards a child who’s tired and doesn’t want to go to bed. And suddenly a warm rain is falling. Addie feels a droplet pelt her face. And another. And another. Opening her eyes, Addie sees the roosters twirling overhead. They’re like dancing girls, she thinks, girls dancing the mazurka, holding up their dresses and throwing up their cotillions. Paloma’s dancing, too, dancing with the roosters, swinging them round and round, wringing their necks, chanting, “Ensuso kabwinda…Embele kiamene…. Eki mengankisi…” and blood is raining over Addie, a few light drops, and on the tar baby, too, on Lucero, and Addie sees that he has turned away from her. He’s taken them instead of her.

  And around her in the room, the people sing,

  “Ahora sí menga va corre, como corre,

  Ahora sí menga va corre, sí seño,

  Ahora sí menga va corre…”

  It’s like a beautiful old song Addie remembers from somewhere long ago, like a lullaby her mother sang her in her childhood, or another life that Addie put away in the box with all the other broken toys and then forgot. And the blood is falling, menga va corre, como corre, like a soft, warm rain, and it isn’t horrible to her. There is no horror here. Addie feels like a young girl at church, the way she felt at St. Michael’s long ago, taking first communion, when she walked outside into spring light and the fragrance of gardenias, and Great Michael was pealing overhead, and the day was beautiful and still and filled with peace. The rest that has eluded her these many days steals over her, and Addie sleeps for a time that seems like years, though only seconds pass. The sound of Paloma’s voice wakes her.

  “Bring the knife.”

  “The knife?” says Jarry.

  “Nkuyu has shown me what to do….”

  Reaching under the peignoir that Addie chose so carefully, so specifically, Paloma lifts the silk directly over Addie’s heart, and cuts away the button of French nacre—the one that Addie picked out for its deep-sea gleam. Tying the button’s hasp to the black hair on Addie’s temple, Paloma starts to pull and Addie feels it coming, hank by hank, like a piece of fishing line she’s swallowed, up through her bowels, up through her intestines’ winding course. Then Paloma drops it in a blue bottle filled with chamba and seals the cork with wax. Picking up the Bible, the old woman sits back in her chair, relaxed, and reads Psalm 51:

  “Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation, and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.

  “For thou desirest not sacrifice, else I would give it; thou delightest not in burnt offering.

  “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.”

  “Now I’ve done all I can,” Paloma says. “For the rest, we must wait and see.” She regards her son, speculatively and close, and Jarry nods his thanks.

  It’s dusk as he carries Addie out again, dusk as she hears the creaking of the wheels, dusk as he carries her upstairs and tucks her into the fresh linen.

  “Thank you, Jarry,” Addie whispers hoarsely as he cups her nape and lifts her up to drink.

  He smiles and wipes her forehead with a cloth, then lowers her gently, like a rag doll, to the pillow. And Addie waits now for the coldness in her hands and feet. She waits for her teeth to start to chatter. It’s six o’clock. Now seven comes and goes. It’s a little after eight when Addie falls asleep. And for the first time in weeks, she gets a night’s uninterrupted rest. In the morning, she’s weak, but Addie knows by subtle signs that the sickness has departed. And all of this will quickly come to seem unreal, her conversation with Lucero or Nkuyu something that happened in a dream, when she was talking in her sleep.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Through the secret garden, where the scent of orange blossoms lingered, he led the children past Aunt Tildy’s headless nymph, her breasts exposed and lovely, though splotched with acid rain. One svelte arm extended, her finger pointed down into the rippling pool that, always emptying, was always full. When Ransom looked, a goldfish whisked its tail, a brilliant flash amidst the waterweeds…. Now the big black brass-knobbed door was parting. Meeting Street and open sky again.

  As they emerged, the Charlestonian in black cashmere was hoisting his golf bag into the trunk.

  “How’s it going, man?” said Ran, affecting normality, but hurrying the children on and lowering his gaze as they passed by.

  The man frowned and made no answer. In the windshield of the parked car they were walking toward, Ran saw him step from behind the Benz, saw him place his hands on his lean hips and stare.

  “Love those loafers!” Ransom, at the car, could not resist. There was a tremor in his hand as he unlocked the door, and the sound of the golf bag—the specific clank of graphites landing in the trunk—hit him like the sound of a maul on an iron railroad spike, a rattling chain, a lash, and Ransom dropped the keys.

  The carabiner he used for a key ring lodged between two bars of a sewer grate, and as Ran knelt to fish them out, the trickle of bright water running far below the street made him think about Shanté, the summer she came home from Northfield, when they fell in love and made their plan to run away….

  Ran was working at the New Jerusalem Church then, making a dollar thirty-five an hour, but Shanté’s cousin, Wallace, said the Killdeer Country Club was where the good, big money was. So one Sunday morning, early, Ran made the trek to the west side. The golf pro, Tommy Janklow, looking sour and hungover in opaque dark glasses, listened to him lie about his previous experience and didn’t really seem to give a shit. He assigned Ran to the first foursome of the day, which, as fate would have it, included Herbert Kincannon, Mel’s personal bête noire and capitalist nemesis. When the owner of Dixie Bag asked for his Big Bertha on the tee at number one, Ran handed him a four wood by mistake, then dropped the bag when Kincannon was in the middle of his swing. It went downhill from there.

  Two hours later, as they headed up eighteen, Kincannon’s face had gone pinker than his Izod shirt, a color closer to the medium-rare roast beef the chef was carving in the club upstairs. Big Herbert hadn
’t spoken to his caddy for the whole back nine, and Ransom, for his part, looked like he’d been swimming in his clothes. He had open blisters on his heels and a tingling numbness in his shoulder from the bag. Kincannon putted out, then turned and said, in a loud, public voice that made everyone in earshot turn, “What’s your name again?” It was the first time he had asked.

  Ransom answered, and Kincannon said, “Your daddy’s Mel Hill, ain’t he?”

  The trap was sprung, but Ransom merely blinked a sullen, frightened blink, refusing to step in. Not that it saved him.

  “Mel Hill’s a sorry, no-count drunk who couldn’t sew a straight seam with a ruler,” Kincannon said, “and if you live life like you caddy, you’re gonna end up like him, if not worse. Now get your peckerwood ass outta here. I never want to see you at the Killdeer Country Club again. No Hill has business on this side of town. Never did, and never will.”

  Then, peeling two damp ones off his pocket roll, he dropped them on the apron of the green and stalked away.

  Upstairs at the big plate-glass windows, people coming straight from church to the buffet had gathered two and three deep to watch the goings-on on number eighteen green. Some boy made a catcall; another laughed. An older woman shushed them. Humanity expressed itself across its range, or so it seemed to Ransom Hill that day.

  What he remembered later, though, what Ran remembered now, in fact, kneeling on the rusty sewer grate—having temporarily forgotten where he was, what he was doing there, his wife, his children, his past success, his hope of future happiness in life, and, in the deepest way, himself—was the girls on their chaises by the pool, separated from him by the railing’s iron bars. Sunning on their stomachs, bikini straps undone, they held their polka-dotted tops as they raised up to watch these interesting developments, and one of them—Ran didn’t know her name, but he could see her still, in Wayfarers—took a cherry coke in a tall glass that Wallace, in livery now, brought her from the clubhouse on a tray. Pursing her lips around the straw, she sipped and watched to see if the caddy boy beside the row of carts would stoop to take his pay. Ransom, who had earned the money, left it lying where it was and walked away with nothing to show for his morning but hurt feelings and blisters on his heels. For all he knew, those two damp bills were still out there blowing through the universe, still unclaimed, still his.

  “Doddy?”

  Ran looked up into Charlie’s curious stare. Charlie blinked, then stared down into the grate. “What you looking for down dere, Doddy?”

  “The keys to the highway,” Ransom answered, without hesitation, at Charlie’s level, face-to-face and man-to-man.

  Charlie extended his small fist and opened.

  “And there they are,” said Ran. Wiping his sleeve across his eyes, he sat back on the curb, took a gasping breath, and stood. “Ho, shit—hoo-ah! Come on, team, pile in.”

  As he strapped them in, however, the sounds of a minor fracas drifted up the street.

  “There he is!” said someone—it sounded like Alberta Johns.

  When he looked back toward Tildy’s, the young policewoman had a finger pointed straight between his eyes. “You, there, stop!” she shouted. “You, don’t move! Stop that man!” Fumbling her hat on, she started running up the block, gun and nightstick pummeling her sides.

  The Charlestonian in cashmere looked at Ran, at her, at Ran again, then set off toward them at a sprint. “You there! Stop!”

  “Don’t mess with me,” Ran warned, opening the driver’s door.

  “What’s going on here?” He grabbed Ransom’s shoulder.

  Ransom stepped out and knocked him down.

  “Daddy! Daddy, don’t! Don’t, Daddy!” Hope screamed in back, but Ran had zeroed in.

  “These are my kids,” he said, “mine, motherfucker. Not yours. You understand?” Ran stood over him, a big man, crazed and utterly committed. “Nod for yes.”

  The Charlestonian nodded, surprised, apparently, to find himself afraid.

  What surprised him in the moment—Ran, the pacifist, who’d dodged the draft and forgone meat for thirteen years—was the sudden soaring sense he felt, the electric zing that shot through his meridians, not a sense of trespass, but command.

  The young officer had now arrived, flushed and panting, holding down her hat. “Stop right there,” she said, out of breath and frightened, unsnapping the retaining strap on her service .38.

  Ran faced her, calm and eagle-eyed. “These are my children,” he explained. “I’m their father. I’m taking them for ice cream. If you’re going to shoot me, go the fuck ahead.”

  In the backseat, both kids were crying now. “Doddy! Doddy!”

  “Please don’t shoot him!”

  “Don’t shoot Doddy!”

  “I can’t let you go,” she said.

  Ransom smiled at her the way a man smiles at a child, then climbed into the Odyssey and pulled, unhurriedly, away.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Health, as it returns, is like water from a cool, sweet well, and Addie takes measured sips in these first days, savoring it the way she has few things before. But where is Jarry? Sitting dressed beside the window, staring out into the park, she waits and wonders why he doesn’t come. Into her green reverie, the voice speaks and says, He is afraid. But she is frightened, too; it’s as if the permission her near death extended them has been withdrawn by her return to life. And how are they to find each other now? The answer isn’t far to seek: if permission is withdrawn, then she must give it to herself. Addie finds a pretext for a visit in a borrowed volume on her shelf.

  So today, for the first time since their conversation at the Bluffs, she dresses and goes down, moving tentatively, gripping the banister as she passes in review before the disapproving ancestors, with Percival’s Wordsworth in one hand to steady her.

  The May morning is halcyon and still. Walking down the white sand road, she follows voices to the cooper’s shop, where she finds Jarry with a half dozen men in elated conference.

  “Good morning.”

  “Mistis.” The men stand back, and Jarry—who wears a shirt of clean white homespun with the sleeves rolled past the elbow—smiles and nods her toward an open barrel. “Come look.”

  Inside is a gray, cloudy substance, like translucent ocean sand, still slightly damp.

  “Taste it,” he says, with the expression of a man enjoying fresh success.

  Addie dips her finger. “Wherever did you get it?”

  “We made it.”

  “How on earth does one make salt?”

  “Would you like to see?”

  “Very much.”

  So, while he rigs the sloop, she has the women in the kitchen house prepare a basket lunch, and they set out eastward, running before a light west wind, through the winding thoroughfare of Wando Passo Creek. Before they’ve gone a hundred yards, they come upon the laundress, Hattie, and her crew of girls, cutting up along the bank as they do wash. Dipping the clothes in kettlefuls of suds, the girls throw them onto wooden stretchers and beat them with wide-bladed paddles known as battling sticks. The thwacks resound, following them for half a mile downstream.

  “‘Purge me with hyssop…,’” Addie says under her breath.

  “What?” he calls out from the stern.

  She smiles and shakes her head. “Do you suppose life uses us that way?” she asks instead. “Beats the dirt and sinfulness away so that, at the last, we shall be clean?”

  He smiles, and doesn’t answer. There’s no need; but it is like the day’s motif.

  Over the hissing bow wave, the drumming flutter of the edge of the taut sail, talk becomes impracticable, but they converse in looks and smiles, and Jarry occasionally points things out—a great blue heron perched on one leg in the shallows, a row of turtles on a log, the sort called cooters, prized for soup, black and round as salad plates, with heads uplifted toward the sun. Occasionally, he calls the names of birds. They see rufous-sided towhees and indigo buntings, a white ibis, a kingbird’s nest with young
. There are summer tanagers and flickers, a red-shouldered hawk. And once they see an alligator, twelve or fourteen feet, sunning on the slick clay bank.

  When they leave the creek and sail into the Waccamaw, the whole scene opens up. It’s like God Almighty, Addie thinks, thrusting out His chest to take a deep lungful of air. The world, from here, seems limitless. Things have the gleam of wet shellac. As they make for the wooded western shore of Pawleys Island, a mile distant over open water, a large side-wheeled steamer—two hundred tons or more and a hundred and fifty feet in length—looms up to port. They take her for a riverboat, but, drawing near, they see the gun ports, jury-rigged to fit her added howitzers and Parrott rifled cannon. Crossing her bow—so close, the shadow of the gunboat falls across the sloop—they read the name, Mendota, and, preceding it, the designation, U.S.S. A Federal gunboat in the Waccamaw! Jarry quickly tacks and hauls the sloop upwind, putting distance between them, but not before a Yankee sailor, pissing off the side, catches sight and hails them. “Hey, nigger, can you swim? Half a minute in the drink, and you can be a free man heaving coal for Uncle Abe.”

  The encounter and the sailor’s taunt depress the mood. Putting the tiller in his armpit, Jarry trims the main, avoiding Addie’s glance. Fixing on his navigation point, he stares forward with a doleful face, and Addie wishes he would smile again. And what if she told him and the glass wall broke? If it were gone, then what? It suddenly dawns on her that this is what she fears the most. For if it fell, what would be between them then? Nothing—isn’t that the answer? And is that what she came to do? Addie is like one who’s stepped unwittingly into an ambush she herself has set, and the voice she hasn’t heard in weeks speaks up and tells her, Nothing will be right until you do. But what of Harlan? What about her marriage? Your marriage is a lie that everyone believes but you. Yes, but to see the truth and act on it are different things. A part of her is dying to confess, but to advance a black man’s rights against a white man’s whim—this would be an act not just of disrespect but of outright sabotage, and not toward Harlan only, but toward her class, toward Charleston, toward the South…. She’s never contemplated such a drastic action. So, after the pleasant respite of their morning’s sail, Addie is plunged into anxiety again. She no longer sees the charming river scene and is grateful for the hissing of the bow wave parting on the keel, grateful for the drumming of the edge of the taut sail, grateful when Jarry guides the boat into a small salt creek and beaches it near an encampment in the woods.