Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  Clarisse is eight months pregnant now, and changed. Her former animation has been replaced by a wan languor. Instead of silk, she’s dressed in a loose frock of simple white and purple calico, and her hair is loose and halfway down her back.

  “Are you doing this to me?” Addie demands.

  Clarisse seems unsurprised. She neither replies nor asks her mistress in, her demeanor formal, polite and cold.

  “What have I done to you?” asks Addie. “The past is what it is and can’t be changed, Clarisse. I, too, have been wronged, but I hold no grudges. We are two women here alone. Can we not live in peace?”

  Clarisse stares into Addie’s eyes with a severe and threatening neutrality. “You hold no grudges….”

  “None. I’ve borne and bear you no ill will.”

  “The gun bears no ill will,” she answers, “but it kills you nonetheless. You want peace and bear no grudge, but it’s you, nene, you who are the bullet in my head. Afuera con embuchado, china.” Her eyes smolder, and she steps onto the porch. “If you want peace, there is the road.” She points. “Stay, and you will die. This is your warning. I give you only one. It is a promise, not a threat.”

  “You hate me, don’t you? Why?”

  “If you were starving,” Clarisse replies, “I would take the final crust of bread out of your mouth and watch you starve and spit upon your grave and dance for happiness when you were dead. And all this, I would consider justice.”

  Her hate is like a wind that blows Addie back against the rail. “Justice? To return deliberate harm for harm unmeant?”

  “This was my father’s land,” says Clarisse, “where you now live. My mother put her whole life into it; my brother, Jarry, much of his. It belongs to Harlan now, my brother. If he should die, is it your intention to surrender it to me and to my child, Harlan’s child, what is ours through blood and right, which you’ve done nothing for?”

  “Whatever you’ve been to him, Clarisse, I’m Harlan’s wife. If we have children, the property will pass to them.”

  “There is your answer then. Ask yourself, nene, if you were me, if you had ‘been to him’ what I have been, and loved as I have loved, and suffered what I felt, if you now carried in your body what I hold in mine, would you not feel what you intend as harm and would not that harm seem ‘meant’?”

  Addie can muster no reply to this.

  “Harlan was like you,” Clarisse goes on, “and, before him, Father. He meant no ‘harm’ when he took my mother and sailed away with her, leaving me with Wenceslao. Harlan told you something of my history. What he did not tell you was who that old man was to me. From the time I was eight years old, china, Wenceslao came to my room at night, this man I believed to be my father. Do you know what it is, when a man does this? It is as if he puts a knife into your tender place. That place is not made to feel bad feeling, but for one thing only, to feel what is dulce, oloroso…sweet…And if you put a knife into a place that is meant only for sweetness, what is it you feel? Sweetness, china. This is what he did to me. For years, he put his tired old knife into the place of sweetness, and because I was a child and knew nothing else, I took this for love. For love. You see? I thought this is what fathers do. I thought this is family, this is human life. I wanted him to be with me, and then his wife discovered us, and I was sent away to the Franciscanos en Guanabacoa. And Wenceslao died and left me not a peso. My best hope, then, you see, is for some pardo tradesman, some free Negro man to marry me.

  “Then Harlan came. He brought me money. We looked into each other’s eyes and felt love, what I look into your face and do not see. Am I mistaken? No, it isn’t there. You don’t love him. Look at this.”

  She steps inside and takes a picture from a shelf. “Look,” Clarisse repeats, handing Addie a tintype portrait of herself, seated in a chair with a closed fan pressed against the breast of her black dress. Her straight dark hair is piled, as formerly, à la giraffe, held in place by the roof-tile comb of tortoiseshell and sterling. Behind her, a younger, fresher Harlan stands, stout and prematurely balding, with muttonchops he must have later realized brought out the weakness of his chin. He’s dressed in a manner Addie could never have imagined, like a Cuban dandy, in a swallowtail coat, nankeen breeches, flesh-colored hose, with silver buckles on his shoes. His right hand rests on Clarisse’s shoulder, his left—or rather two fingers of it—slipped between the buttons of his piqué waistcoat. In his mouth is a cigar.

  “Do you know what this is? It’s our engagement portrait. We had it made to give to Mama and to him, to Percival. This, you see, this love was the best thing that happened in my life. It changed everything for me. Then we arrived, and it was taken from me, too, by him, by you, and no one, no one meant me any harm! Everyone wants peace, like you!”

  “I didn’t fully comprehend what this had been for you,” says Addie now. “But, still…Still, Clarisse, would it not ease you to forgive?”

  Her laugh is furious. “You mistake me, china. It isn’t ease I seek. I want what’s mine. I won’t be thrown away or left to beg for scraps. I may suffer, I may be destroyed, but if it comes, I’ll know that those who did this wrong to me will suffer more. Including you, ‘who mean no harm.’ No, nene, the only peace there’ll ever be between the two of us is when you leave or when you’re dead. You decide. Now go.”

  FORTY-SIX

  The tires went tump-tump, and they were home.

  Returning straight from Tildy’s, Claire carried Hope upstairs and tucked her in. She took a melancholy read of the frown her daughter wore in sleep. Daddy’s little girl. Thinking of Gardener and herself as much as Hope and Ran, Claire experienced a heavy pang of doubleness, child and mother both. With a sigh, she pulled the sheet over Hope’s bare shoulder and tiptoed down the hall to Charlie’s room. Backlit by the hall light, she stood silent in the door and watched, arms crossed and elbows cupped, as Cell unbuttoned Charlie’s shirt, then, supporting his nape, lowered him like a rag doll to the pillow and, one by one, untied his little shoes.

  “What?” he whispered as he passed her in the door.

  “I can’t even get his clothes off without waking him.”

  Seeing her furred eyes, his furred, too.

  Downstairs, as Claire switched on the portrait lamps, she glanced at the empty hooks above the door, and she and Marcel traded looks.

  “Could he have gone to Killdeer, do you think?”

  “Why?” she asked him. “Ran has no one in Killdeer anymore.”

  “He’s probably just driving, Claire. I doubt he has a plan.”

  “Do you think it’s too late to call that Sergeant Thomason?”

  “I wouldn’t. And anyway, the police already know, don’t they?”

  “I guess they do. It’s unbelievable, Marcel. He’s forty-five years old and now he’s going to fight the law? Who does he suppose is going to win?”

  “I’m not sure winning’s at the top of Ran’s priorities right now.”

  “Has it ever been? I wish someone could tell me what is at the top of Ran’s priorities.”

  He blinked but didn’t look away. “If you want my vote, I say we wait a bit before getting too proactive. He’ll probably show up here before too long.”

  “That’s what I’m half afraid of.”

  He studied her. “Meaning…”

  “Meaning my husband, who’s off his meds and crazy as a shithouse rat, is out there somewhere with a shotgun, and you’re telling me he may be coming here? I don’t know, Marcel. I honestly can’t tell you I’m not a little spooked.”

  “Well, if it makes you feel any better, I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Damn straight, you’re not. In fact, if you don’t mind, I’d like your keys.” She held her hand out, and Marcel smiled. Claire, however, didn’t. “Let’s have a drink. Since you’re my captive and all. Do you agree?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I absolutely second that.”

  She poured them each three fingers of Clive’s old single-barrel sour mash, then sank
beside him on the scuffed green leather sofa—not too close together, not too far apart. “Do you know what he told me on the phone? He said, ‘I know what’s going on, Claire.’”

  “Meaning what?”

  “I think he thinks we’re having an affair.”

  Claire’s face was sober, and Marcel briefly held her stare, then let his head recline against the sofa back. In the quiet, with the windows open, they could hear cicadas chirring in the trees. When he finally spoke, his voice was soft. “So, what exactly are we having?”

  “Oh, shit, Cell, don’t,” she answered, with a husky note. She touched his arm. “Don’t do this now, okay? Do we really have to?”

  He turned his head to look at her. His face was sad. “I think we do.”

  Now Claire’s expression settled, too.

  “All these years, Claire, ever since Mt. Hermon…”

  “You loved Shanté.” She cut him off and wiped her brimming eyes.

  “I had a crush on her, but really, it was you. You’re why I went to Juilliard. I joined the band because of you. I thought I could take it, but I couldn’t. It came to me that day on the F train, coming back from Coney Island. You had on that little peach-colored dress and Wayfarers, and your nose was burnt. You were eating a cherry ice, and it came to me, ‘All it ever was was talking in our sleep, that’s all…Just talking in my sleep.’”

  “I knew that’s what it meant,” she whispered. Her face was soft now, and her eyes were bright and deep.

  “I had to get on with my life. And I did. I got over you, and twenty years went by, and then one day the phone rang and there you were. It was as if no time had passed at all. And to lose you again…”

  “I understand,” she said. She took his hand in hers and put it in her lap. “You know what it is for me?”

  “What?”

  “There was this time in my life, Cell, long ago now, at Northfield and those first years in New York, when I felt better than I do now, better than I am. I felt clearer in myself, more confident, in touch with something…I almost want to say holy—I know that sounds ridiculous….”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “I felt that way when I was in my teens and twenties. I don’t even remember where I lost it. I just know I did. I woke up one day and it was gone. And now I’m forty-two. I gave up on ever feeling that again almost twenty years ago. I thought, That’s part of growing up, it’s just the human lot. Now here I am, and here you are, and suddenly I feel that way again. And it’s not that what I felt for Ransom wasn’t true, Marcel—it was for a long time. It’s just that, after an even longer one, it was over, and I haven’t wanted it to be. I kept thinking there had to be some way to coax it back to life. I feel like the condemned person; it’s eleven fifty-nine and I’m still waiting for the governor’s call. But it isn’t going to happen, is it?”

  He held her gaze, then his eyes drifted, and hers followed his. The mantel clock said 12:15.

  “Shit,” she said. “Oh, shit, Marcel. I knew. After all his talk of how he’s changed and how hard he means to try, to find out he’s been off his meds…When he told me that, I felt something just go crack inside me. That was it. I used to love him, now I don’t. Now I love you, and you love me. You do, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  “It’s just that simple, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “Oh,” she said, “oh, Cell, I’ve been so scared of this conversation, so scared. I put it off and put it off for months. I told myself it was because of Hope and Charlie, but what am I teaching them—to go down with the ship? To stick it out even when it’s dead? That’s not what I want them to remember when they look back at my life. And Ran. I feel so bad for him, Marcel. Now I have you, and you have me, but who does Ransom have? He’s out there somewhere with a gun, and if he hurt himself…But, the truth is, every time I’ve ever tried to pull away, he’s lured me back by getting sick. For years, I’ve let myself be held hostage with that threat, and I’m not going to do it anymore. I’m just not.”

  “It’s hard, though, isn’t it?”

  She squeezed his hands. “So hard. So hard. Thank you for seeing that. It’s like dying, Cell.”

  He reached out and wiped her cheek. “Do you know what your boy Faulkner said, the one thing that really made me think he might have been as great as everybody said? He said, ‘It takes an awful lot of character to quit anything when you’re losing.’”

  “Oh,” she said, stricken. “Oh, it’s true, isn’t it? But I’m happy, too, Marcel. I’ve wanted to say this to you for the longest time. You knew, didn’t you?”

  “How would I have known, Claire?”

  “You’re right,” she answered, stroking his face and smiling as tears ran down her cheeks. “How would you? I’ve been denying it for months, haven’t I? I am de Queen of de Nile, aren’t I?”

  “You are,” he said, smiling, too, holding her wet face between his hands, “you are de fucking Queen of de fucking Nile.”

  And now she kisses him, and the kiss is like a book that seizes them and neither can put down. At the end of every chapter, they’re compelled to turn the page, into a new adventure, and it goes on and on, and they’re lost in it and lose all sense of time, and when it ends, they’re refreshed like dreamers who awake and have no idea how long they’ve slept.

  Then Claire stands up and offers him her hand.

  Upstairs, in the big bed, which isn’t hers and Ransom’s anymore, which, as of tonight, is only Claire’s, she whispers, “Even if we do this, we can still turn back, right?”

  Marcel gazes down, unsmiling, with tender fearlessness, and answers, “I don’t think so, Claire.” And then he drops his face against her neck, and they begin.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Walking from Clarisse’s back home through the swamp that day, Addie all but decides to leave. She doesn’t take Clarisse’s threats lightly, doesn’t take them lightly in the least. Yet she doesn’t go, and why? Addie hardly knows the reason. Deep down, she is angry, too, angry both with Clarisse and like Clarisse. Addie’s angry at the war, at the way her marriage has turned out, at life, her life, which is not what she expected, not what she was promised and felt herself entitled to. She’s still waiting, waiting somewhere deep inside, for the true thing to start. And it hasn’t. There’s a part of her, connected to this anger, that won’t be driven out—not by Clarisse, or anyone. And so that night, instead of packing to join Blanche and Delphine in Cheraw, Addie leaves the hall door open when she goes to bed. She lies awake and waits, and nothing comes. And the fear passes, as it did when she was eight. She’s still shy of mirrors, though, and when the fields are flowed, Addie makes a point to not look down.

  She takes satisfaction in the work. By 1863, there’s beginning to be hunger everywhere. Fifteen cents before the war, beef, now, in Charleston, is three dollars a pound…. A dollar for a cabbage—not even the head, but just the leaves! She must see the crop is made. There’s nothing but her will holding things together anymore. Running off in twos and threes since ’61, the slaves, emboldened by Emancipation, vanish now in fives and tens and take the boats. A quarter of them, gone. So every morning now this spring, in one of Percival’s straw hats, she’s on the first flat to the fields. Her face and arms, by May, are long since brown. She wears a dress of white and purple calico sewn by her own hand from the same bolt pilfered from the storehouse by Clarisse. Addie’s last good dress—the blue from Mrs. Cummings’s shop in the now-dated style called bayadere—went to the Ladies Christian Auxiliary for bandages, to wrap the bloody stump of some poor amputee. The hospitals…the suffering is so terrible there. Three-quarters of her crop of rye is flatted to the still in Mars Bluff, made into demijohns of whiskey and shipped out on the train. For what relief have they to give the wounded and the dying now but drunkenness? And Wando Passo’s mistress will starve her animals to give it to them, and who shall tell her no?

  No, she will stay and do her little part, though some mornings, o
n the dike, so help her, when the slant sun hits the fields—which are under the Long Water now, as Oliver and Tim wade through and rake away the trash—she wonders how Almighty God can justify such beauty, how He can still allow the sun to shine, the rice to needle up and head, so bountiful and green, out of the mud.

  And Chancellorsville, dear God, another victory—and how is she to feel? Her heart cannot but exult for Lee and for his gallant troops. But, oh, the cost. Jackson, lost, oh, Jackson. They shall not soon find his like. For Addie, now, despite the exultation, the notion of young boys with feathers in their caps, running yelling up a hill behind a flag into a withering rain of iron fire, dying with high hearts and cheers upon their lips, no longer seems so fine as once it did. Against the roll, the absent names, the funerals, the mothers dressed in black and clutching handkerchiefs, not to weep in, but to catch some last, brief scent their sons or husbands left in them, the waste, the appalling, simple waste of it, on fine May mornings such as this, makes her want to fall and beat her fists against the earth and cry, What for? What is it for? States’ rights? Self-determination? The orators intone in terms like these. “The torch of liberty, passed from the framers’ hands, falls now to us to defend against the Northern despots as once our fathers fought the English kings….” Addie hears the fine, high-sounding words, but it’s hard for her to think in such abstractions anymore. Watching Oliver and Tim, waist-deep in black water in their swimming shirts, alert for moccasins, Addie thinks, States’ rights, self-determination, the torch of liberty…it all boils down to this: the right to keep them here, unpaid, against their will, to make the rice for which we shall receive the gain. The framers fought for freedom from oppression; we fight for the freedom to continue to oppress. Is this not so? Is this not the “right” her state has chosen to assert, the path that Southern “self-determination” takes? A spy, a stranger, in her own land, yet Addie stays to make the rice. And will God, Addie wonders, let us win?