Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  His phone rang. “Where are you?”

  “Close, I’m watching you….”

  Every move you make…every breath you take… The voice now, doing Sting, was singing in his head.

  “Ransom, come inside. You need help. Let us get you some.”

  “Us?”

  The silence on her end made something wallow in his gut.

  Tildy’s house was all lit up. On the upstairs piazza, Ran saw Della supporting one of Tildy’s arms. Marcel held the other.

  “I know what’s going on,” he said, with a quaver in his voice.

  “Ran, come home,” she said, denying nothing.

  “I can’t. I better not.”

  “Why? Why can’t you? Why had you better not?”

  Because I have this feeling, Claire—this bad, bad feeling—and if I find out it’s true, I honestly don’t know what I might do.

  The voice made its suggestion, but Ransom, weeping, merely closed the phone and dropped it in the trash can as he climbed into the van.

  “What do I do now?” he whispered as he turned the key. “What the fuck do I do now?” But neither the author of the universe nor his arch-nemesis, Captain Nemo—the little voice that didn’t seem so little anymore—returned an answer. And Ransom didn’t have a clue.

  Umm-umm-umm, blues falling down, like hail,

  Got to keep moving…

  sang the ghost of Robert Johnson, in the timeless voice of troubled people everywhere. Was that an answer? In the moment—as Ransom, in the darkness, watched his wife pull to the big black door, enclosing herself and their children in the safety of a lighted world—it was all the answer Ransom knew.

  …keep moving

  Got a hell hound on my trail.

  FORTY-ONE

  As Addie walks along the white sand road, she can hear drumming from the quarters. There are shouts and frenzied laughter. She can see firelight through the trees and leaping silhouettes against the pyre. Since nightfall, there’s been a feeling of unrest, of order breaking down and energies unleashed in the wake of Paloma’s funeral. For the first time at Wando Passo, she feels afraid, a stranger in a home she only tenuously possesses, yet despite her fear, she continues on her way to Jarry’s house.

  Those who’ve gathered to commiserate are mostly house staff and some elder slaves who practice trades. She’s made a pound cake from her aunt’s recipe—and Blanche’s mother’s before that. Addie spent a good part of the day on it. The effort helped her nerves. The mourners look up when she knocks and enters with her covered basket. Conversation stops. Jarry looks at her, and in his glassy eyes, there is a brief, hot light she cannot read.

  “Where should I put…?”

  “Let me take that from you,” he says, with rushed politeness, rising and crossing the room.

  “If you’ll just show me…”

  “No, let me.”

  And it is a pathetic comedy, she thinks, this mutual deferral.

  She follows him into the small dining room, where the table is laden with other gifts of food. He takes the basket, puts it down, and when he turns to her, she whispers—for the door is open to the other room—“Jarry, I know this is not the time, but I’ve been in agony since yesterday. If I may only have a minute of your—”

  “No,” he says, “no, I also wish to speak to you. And I have something for you, too. I’ll join you on the porch.”

  And as she proceeds back through the room, Addie notes how studious the other mourners are not to look at her. They know, she thinks. They know. She has weighed anchor and has neither the ability nor the wish to return to port. The seriousness of it is heavy on her mood as she goes outdoors, yet it’s freeing, too, and only makes her more determined to say what she has come to say. She gazes at the leaping figures silhouetted by the pyre, and then she hears his step.

  “It’s strange,” she says, “how different the feeling is today than at your father’s funeral.”

  “They respected him. Her, they loved.”

  And now she turns. “Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? You have that same thing she had, Jarry, that cutting thing that goes straight to the heart. I love that part of you, and I can’t bear to think you’re angry with me, Jarry. You have a right to be, but I can’t bear it if you are.”

  “Love”—it’s the first time she’s used the word, and, strangely, he seems almost pained by it. “I’m not angry, Addie.”

  “I’m so relieved!” She steps toward him, reaches for his hands and finds them occupied, finds her book, her Byron in red morocco. In the yellow lamplight from the window, she sees his solemn face, and her relief is short-lived.

  “Anger isn’t what I feel,” he says, in a tone that’s soft, but firm, and he presses the book into her hands that want only to hold his. As he turns away and walks to the far end of the porch, Addie catches the scent of musk roses from the climber in the yard.

  “Then what…”

  “I’ve thought about our conversation, too,” he says. “The person I believed you were could not have done this. You’re someone else. I don’t know who you are.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Addie says. “I don’t believe that in my heart. You do know me. You’re the only one who ever has. And if I’ve hurt your trust, then you must let me earn it back. I will.”

  “If you’d seen me, Addie, if you had any notion who I truly am, you could not have done this. Had I been in your place, I don’t believe I would have to you.”

  “But I do see you, Jarry,” she says, crossing to him, looking fervently into his face, “I do see you. I see you the way no one ever has or ever will.”

  “Then tell me this,” he says. “Had I been white and free, like Harlan is, would you have kept this from me? Would you have kept from him a truth as fateful to his happiness as you knew this one was to me?”

  “Oh, Jarry,” she says, “I don’t know, I don’t know! How am I to answer? Perhaps I wouldn’t have. Perhaps I would have told him, but—”

  “That’s what I believe. You certainly would have. Not to have told him would have been a stain upon your honor. Whereas to tell me now…isn’t it essentially an act of charity? A philanthropic act toward one less fortunate, of lower circumstances than yourself? No, Addie, for you to tell me this is an act of generosity, a grace note in your character, whereas not to have told a white man would have been an inexpungable disgrace. This, Addie, this”—and he is earnest now, and fierce—“is where you cannot see me. This is where I am invisible to you.”

  “But you’re wrong, Jarry. You are so, so wrong! I don’t feel generous. Not a day has passed, not an hour, that this hasn’t weighed upon my conscience, especially in light of all you and your mother did for me when I was ill. And yes, my silence was disgraceful. I have disgraced myself, but, Jarry, try to understand…. If you seeme as you wish to be seen, you must grasp that I was silent out of fear and weakness. I felt my loyalties divided. I was confused, my dear. I didn’t act with evil in my heart—surely you don’t think that? I had no intent to harm. Don’t I at least deserve the chance to correct a fault when it is pointed out to me? If I don’t see you fully, if I’ve seen you through a glass darkly, can I not learn to see you face-to-face? Can love not teach me this? Can it not teach us both? Can I not change? Can I not hope that love will make me better than I am? If I’ve failed you, at least give me the chance to amend my fault. Jarry, Jarry…Believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things….”

  Addie’s weeping now and wild, but the softness she so loves in Jarry is absent from his face tonight. “My mother lies there in the graveyard, Addie, dead of grief,” he says. “She went to her death with an accusation in her heart against my father that you and you alone knew to be untrue, and you kept it from her. You kept it from us both, and she died without the consolation of the truth. And if my father’s spirit now suffers I know not what torment, if Clarisse has worked some evil against him…And all this, because you didn’t speak?”

  “You blame me for your m
other’s death?” she answers, shocked. “You hold me responsible for what Clarisse has done? Is this what you believe?”

  “What I believe,” he answers, “is that it can never work. Mother told me this before she died, and I didn’t believe her. I refused. But she was right, Addie. It didn’t work for her and Father. He was a decent and honorable man. He loved her, or believed he did, yet he kept her a slave until the day he died. Harlan loved Clarisse, and look what it has brought her to. None of them, none of you, could see us as you see yourselves, and you do not see me. You can’t.”

  “I do,” she whispers, passionately. “I do.” And now she takes his face between her hands and kisses him, and the kiss is hard and hot and passionate with longing long suppressed and with the desperate fear of losing him.

  Recklessly given, the kiss is recklessly received, but Jarry, when he pulls away, says, in a despairing voice, “I don’t know, Addie. I don’t know…. I must go back.”

  “Go back,” she tells him, tenderly. “Go back to your guests. We’ll speak more of it tomorrow. Will you come? There’s so much more I want to say.”

  This question goes unanswered, too, and Addie will remember, later, that it did. Tonight, she walks home in the dark, and she is troubled, she is sad, but despite this, she’s amazed at the size and power of what she feels. So this is what the poets meant by fate, she thinks. All those years, even when she was a girl, she never quite believed. But everything they promised, everything they said—all of it is true, all of it is real! How strange to no longer be afraid, to no longer want for anything she doesn’t have. How strange to no longer wish to be other than she is. And this is Addie’s thought: So this is what being human truly is.

  She isn’t tired, but she sleeps, and so it isn’t till first light, when she awakes from a dream she briefly recalls, which then slips through her fingers like a thread, that Addie sees her Byron on the stand, and notices the feather, green against the gilded page, and opens to the place it marks.

  ’Tis vain—my tongue cannot impart

  My almost drunkenness of heart,

  When first this liberated eye

  Survey’d Earth, Ocean, Sun, and Sky,

  As if my spirit pierced them through,

  And all their inmost wonders knew!

  One word alone can paint to thee

  That more than feeling—I was Free!

  It is “The Bride of Abydos,” the verse that Percival prevailed on Jarry to recite to her on that first day, but there are these lines, too:

  E’en for thy presence ceased to pine;

  The World—nay, Heaven itself was mine….

  When Addie reads this, she has a premonition that darkens into certainty when Tenah comes to tell her Jarry’s gone.

  Part III

  THE HOT-WET PHASE

  FORTY-TWO

  The old man—was it Mel?—was whispering in Ransom’s ear…. And now his voice to me was like a stream scarce heard, nor word from word could I divide…. Straining to make it out, Ran, in the driver’s seat, jerked awake in time to see the black dog in the head lightbeams. He swerved to miss it, and then he saw the tree. Holy shit! he thought as it loomed up. Holy shit! The oak spread its black arms. This can’t be it? he thought. His stomach did a pressure drop, and at the same time, he felt strangely light. When else was death going to strike but when you least expected it? What other rabbit had he thought to pull out of this hat? So this was where the clues had been leading all along, this, the journey he’d been on!

  But there’s still so much I want to do, he thought. And Nemo said, not without a certain tenderness, But, really, Ran, like what? Something in him deflated then. True, he thought, too true. But on the other hand, Fuck you! As the Odyssey took wing, something else in Ran came to. He screamed the words aloud. “Fuck you!” he roared. “I want to see my children grown! At their weddings, I want to dance beneath the tent! I want to see Claire’s face when it grows old! I want to hold her wrinkled hand when I go out! The last thing I want to see when I leave this shithole world is those crème caramel eyes I helped to burn and know we made it anyway, know that we outlived it all, even our differences! And on top of that, you mocking prick, I’m going to finish ‘Nemo’s Submarine’!” Ran, aloud or in his thoughts—it no longer mattered much—said or would have liked to say all this. And Nemo answered, not without a certain tenderness, a chillier, more ethereal strain, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” singing now, doing not just Mick but the whole London Bach Choir, all the parts in the chorale that stood in Ransom’s mind beside the Ninth, an Ode to something, but not Joy. Somehow, that song was in the carousel as it came round, cueing in the changer as it changed, when all the other songs that Ransom Hill had loved, including those he wrote, went down.

  The impact, when it came, was hard, but brief—hardly worth mentioning, in light of everything. Maybe, Ran thought, as he bowed his head to it, he’d underestimated God a bit.

  “Where the fuck’s my airbag, though?” A consumer to the end, the question suddenly occurred to him. “Old Silver! You sonuvabitch! You sold the module on the aftermarket, didn’t you?” Ran felt a certain grudging admiration, and then somehow he was outside the car. How? Logic, continuity—neither, now, was a high priority, and Ransom understood they’d ever only seemed to be. He understood a lot of things. Not the main one, though. It was daylight. How suddenly it came! There were people on the road, a stream, like refugees, all headed in the same direction, moving fast and purposefully. Ran felt inclined to join them, felt the lonesome, longing ache you have in autumn, when you hear the honk of geese. But there, again, was Mel…was it Mel? And there was someone with him.

  “Delores, is that you?” he said. She didn’t look quite like herself, taller, with deeper hollows under her high cheekbones. Her eyes were marbled and opaque, like a poached fish’s.

  Standing at the bottom of the tree in a forbidding pose, she pointed back to where he’d been, looking none too pleased.

  “You’re dead, though, aren’t you?”

  Like a specter in a silent film, she moved her lips, and Ransom heard, as through a muffled wad of gauze, a sound, but not a word, and when he turned his head, he saw the Odyssey lying over on its side, with one front wheel still turning, and his own body slumped at the wheel, clearly dead, then, clap, he was back inside….

  There was the airbag after all, clammily deployed, like a condom engineered for single use. There was something burbling like a stream, and he smelled gas, tasted something sweet and salty on his lips and then his tongue, coming not thinly, in a stream.

  Caught in his shoulder harness like a paratrooper in a treetop over St. Mère Église, Ran reached for the driver’s door above. With his left hand, he tried to shove it up like the too heavy iron hatch of a too heavy iron submarine, but he lacked the proper angle and, finally, the will to open it. So, Ransom, not quite flying, not quite on the ground, suspended, rather, in his fall and not too terribly alarmed, simply closed his eyes and fell asleep.

  When he opened them again, it was morning.

  He did a quick internal diagnostic, like an astronaut ticking off the items on his screen. Neck, a little stiff. Hands, check. Feet, still there. Otherwise, all systems green.

  With his left hand, he reached right and pressed his seat belt tab. It didn’t release.

  “Don’t guess you should complain, old man,” he told himself. “It probably saved your life, and when you get right down to it, you’re sort of of that nonreleasing-under-tension mind-set yourself, aren’t you?”

  This seemed pretty good for one in his condition. Taking heart, Ran did a chin-up toward the roof and freed himself, crashing earthward toward the passenger-side door and making his eventual escape through the sprung rear hatch. And there, on the culprit tree, as if at Ransom’s thought-command, was the sign he’d been looking for when he dozed off: Alafia: Authentic African Village As Seen on TV.

  “Not bad for a nighttime carrier landing,” he said. “Especially given yo
u were fast asleep…”

  The truth was, despite his neck, despite his general soreness, like a boxer’s the day after the fight, Ran felt pretty much all right, even semi-hopeful, as he started down the rutted, sandy two-track into deep pine woods. Like a signal that fades in and out, the sense that he was on a journey came in strong again. So, maybe this wasn’t the end…. Who knew? The end could be a long way off. A damn long way! Maybe this was, in fact, his elusive, long-sought chance for a fresh start. Right here, right now. Why not?

  “Who else gets to make that call but you?” Suddenly last night’s hypothesis seemed less far-fetched. Maybe, after all, the gods had granted an exception in his case and he was finally going to get his break. Within a quarter mile, Ran was feeling pretty goddamned great….

  “This is how human beings are meant to live, isn’t it—going from adventure to adventure, fearlessly?” Eschewing Nemo now, cutting out the middleman, Ran carried on this conversation, mano a mano, with himself. “The modern world, the numbing safety of our days, toiling mindlessly like ants, for what? That’s what’s got us so fucked up.” He was figuring it out, knocking down the major ills like bowling pins, launched upon his bid to roll a straight 300 game. “Self-destruction? Hell, no. Hale, no!” said Ran, reverting to the old Killdeer accent. “Marcel Jones can kiss my ass.” What need for Nemo now? Ransom Hill was Nemo to himself!

  “Are you one hell of a man?” He posed the query to the silent woods. “You are! You da man! You da man!” Addressing himself in the second person, he brayed his chant, ignoring his general soreness, ignoring the mask of crusted blood that lent a sense of immobility to one side of his face, ignoring, in fact, everything that did not accord with his hypothesis, a happy revenant, going down the road of life.