Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  The twenty-first of June…The Point Flow is off now. The fields are dry and they’re pulling weeds by hand, when word comes up from Hasty Point—Lee has crossed the Potomac and is marching north toward the Susquehanna with 160,000 men! The whole South waits with bated breath. Those whose faces have settled into the long stare look about with timid wonder, as though waking up for the first time in two years. And from Vicksburg—they’re saying Grant is dead! That he’s retired his forces to Grand Gulf!

  July the first…The Army of Northern Virginia has taken York—they’re fifteen miles from Harrisburg! On the third, the smuggled papers out of Baltimore speak of a chance skirmish between Lee’s force and Meade’s, some little place called Gettysburg…. On the sixth, they say a major battle has been fought…. The result is “indecisive,” a Northern code word for a Southern victory…By the eighth, the absence of dispatches from Lee’s army is creating an uneasy mood…. And then the tenth, the tenth, oh, the tenth! Vicksburg, fallen! Pemberton has surrendered his command, his whole command, to Grant, who still lives after all. And Port Hudson, lost…The whole Mississippi under Federal control, the Confederacy, cut in half. And Lee, oh, now word comes, a defeat with terrible losses, and the army in full retreat back over the Potomac, under the old man’s grieving, stoic gaze…

  That terrible July, that day of fate, the tenth, as John is opening the trunks with the high tide and letting the Layby water flood the fields, word comes from Charleston, too…. Gillmore’s forces have crossed Lighthouse Inlet from Folly Beach and overrun the Confederate rifle pits on Morris Island. Wagner, where Harlan is, has held, but three-quarters of the island has been lost. The battery is in desperate straits, under constant enfilading fire from the monitors offshore, which raise their guns and rain killing grape and canister over the fort, as Federal troops dig siege guns into breaching batteries in Wagner’s front.

  Not till the fifteenth does Addie learn that Harlan has survived. He writes from Fort Moultrie, where he arrived on Saturday, when the garrison was relieved. Tomorrow, Wednesday, under cover of dark, the boats will take them back. “In haste,” he writes. “Forgive the appearance of the page. A shell has overturned the inkstand. We are under constant fire from Dalgren’s fleet. One can hardly hear to think. The men are tired, but morale is good. The assault on Wagner is expected momently. When I return next week, I shall seek leave. Meet me at the Mills, Tues., inst., at 6 o’clock. I shall only have till midnight. So, my dear, till then…”

  The grand assault comes the night of the eighteenth. By noon the following day, word comes that the battery has held, yet Addie has no word from Harlan. None the next day, nor the next. On Tuesday, nonetheless, she is at the Mills House at five o’clock. At six, he isn’t there. Eight comes. Then ten. Finally, at a quarter past, he walks in. He is so thin, so sunburnt! His full lips look chewed and scabbed. His face and hands are clean, and he’s shined his boots, but they’re down at heel. His cuffs are frayed and his uniform smells of powder and is only as clean as clothes can be that have been washed in seawater without soap. And even as he takes off his hat and smiles across the room, she can see the terrible somberness that’s settled upon him, settled on all of them, the somberness of those who’ve looked upon a fearful secret they must keep both from and for the rest.

  “Forgive me, the boat…” He takes her shoulders in his hands.

  She puts three fingers, tenderly, on his chapped lips. “It’s nothing. I’m so relieved.”

  “It’s been impossible to write.”

  “I have champagne….”

  He looks at it and smiles. “We have little time. In two hours, I must be at the Laurens Street wharf. Let’s take it with us to the room….”

  She gazes up at him, forthright, the way she did their wedding night, and goes.

  Upstairs, though, things do not proceed as she expects. “Forgive me, dear,” he says, “I disgust myself. I should like to take a bath.”

  “Of course.”

  “But pour a glass, and sit with me.”

  “You are so thin, Harlan,” she says, running her hand over his bare chest, where she can count the ribs.

  “As are you. Look at your hands, Addie!”

  “I’ve learned to work.”

  “Would that you’d not had to.”

  “There are worse fates than that.”

  “So there are.” He steps into the tub, leans back, sips his champagne, and puts the glass down on the floor. He closes his eyes. “Such a thing as water, hot water…One forgets….” And now he opens them again. “How are you, Addie?”

  “I hardly know,” she says. “I work and sleep and dread tomorrow’s news. Little else. But we shall make a crop.”

  His eyes study her with a knowing, soft attention she does not remember from before. “You’ve had a time of it, I think.”

  “Little enough, compared to yours.”

  “You see now what Jarry meant to us….”

  She holds his gaze, but doesn’t answer this.

  “You know,” he says, after a time, “he’s in Beaufort. Or he was. He was seen. I believe he’s given them intelligence.”

  Her heart beats harder still.

  “I was certain we would meet upon the parapets. I had such a feeling, Addie, almost a premonition.”

  “And did…”

  He shakes his head wearily. “If he was there, I didn’t see him. I suspect and pray he’s dead and lying in the trench upon the beach with Shaw and all the rest. They killed Cheeves, Addie.”

  “Langdon!”

  “Yes. And Haskell, we think. He’s been missing since the tenth. And Johnny Bee. Macbeth…” He closes his eyes and shakes his head. “God, such a night…I hope to never see its like again…. I don’t want to speak of it….”

  “No, my dear, put it out of your mind.” She touches his hand, dangling limp over the rim.

  “They were three and four deep in the moat,” he says, almost immediately. “The bodies, Addie…” He looks at her with that terrible stare, bemused and vulnerable and deep. “In the dark, we didn’t know who they were till they were almost on the wall…. The cowards, Addie, they sent the niggers in, the Fifty-fourth, to show us their contempt. The Yankees let them take the fire…. They came at eight o’clock, a little before, marching in good order up the beach, and we held our fire and watched them come…. A hundred yards beyond the moat, they charged, and we fired into them…. The whole front of the battery was a streak of fire. It was like tossing pebbles at a cake…. They simply melted, a quarter of their number, perhaps half, in a minute and a half…. The Yankees didn’t even give them scaling ladders. They were left to climb the walls by hand as we rained musket fire down on them. And their boy colonel, Shaw…he wasn’t forty yards from me…he made it to the parapet in the first wave and raised his sword. ‘Onward, boys!’ I heard him shout. Really, he was rather fine, but it was suicide. A dozen balls hit him in the face and chest and down he fell into our ranks…. And still the niggers came…. We fought them on the ramparts, Addie, hand to hand, with swords and bayonets. I have to say, they fought like men, but they had no chance. They could not advance, and to retreat was suicide. It put them back under our artillery…. When it was done atone o’clock that night, they lay tangled in the moat and on the sea beach, rolling in the swash…. There is this new light, Addie, this terrible calcium light they turn upon the walls to blind our gunners. I shall never forget when it was over…. They swept the beach with that, and the fiddler crabs, Addie—hundreds, thousands of them—you could see them creeping from their holes toward the dead….” He reaches for his glass and closes his eyes and takes another sip.

  “The next morning, under flag of truce, we buried them. Gillmore asked for Shaw, and I felt we should have returned his body, but Graham would not relent. So we pushed him with his niggers into the same common trench. Now their sappers—when I left, they were barely ninety yards outside our wall—must tunnel through the remains of their own dead. Not a shell falls on that beach t
hat doesn’t open up a grave. And the very water that we drink, Addie, the very water, brown, as brown as tea…”

  “Oh, Harlan!”

  “I tell you, frankly,” he goes on, “we shall not withstand another such assault. And it’s sure to come, Addie, as sure as you are there and I am here.”

  He looks at her, and she thinks, What am I to say? What am I to do?

  But Harlan does not require an action on her part. He simply slips off his wedding ring and holds it out.

  “Harlan, no…”

  He opens her hand gently and puts it there. “I couldn’t bear it, Addie, to think of some Yankee private taking it as a memento, the way I’ve seen them do. And ours.”

  “I’ll keep it then, but only till you return.”

  “Yes,” he says. “Till then. Should something happen to me, though…”

  “Harlan, please—”

  “No,” he cuts her off. “There’s a time when speaking of such things is morbid, Addie, but that time is past. I’ve left my will with Father’s attorney, Edward Laurens, on Broad Street. I think you know the place….”

  “I do.”

  “I’ve left everything to you.”

  “It’s generous of you,” she says. “I hope I shall never have the benefit of it.”

  “It is my wish you should. It’s little enough, Addie. I’ve ruined your life.”

  “You haven’t. No.”

  “Let’s speak the truth for once.”

  She holds his stare, and he stares back, and Addie, now, is moved. “You’ve changed,” she says.

  “As have you. The war has changed us all.”

  “And Clarisse?”

  “What about her?”

  “What is your wish?”

  “Damn Clarisse,” he says. “If I’ve ruined your life, she’s ruined mine. She shall have nothing from me, Addie. Not one dime.”

  “You know she has…”

  “A child. Yes, I know. I pity him. He didn’t cause what he is, but he’s an abomination to me nonetheless. He shall never have a father’s love any more than I had mine.” From his pocket, he takes out his watch. “Look, it’s already eleven twenty-five.”

  “Should we…?”

  He shakes his head. “There isn’t time.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “No, I must go.”

  From the Mills House, they walk south through the deserted streets, as they walked after Sumter, when the crowds strolled arm in arm in their best clothes, and church bells rang, and the harbor filled with the white sails of pleasure boats. Addie can’t get that prior walk, that prior time, out of her mind, yet she says nothing, hoping Harlan may be spared the memory. She’s never felt so close to him, but it’s tinged with an imponderable regret. Around them, under a brilliant gibbous moon, all is blackened, silent desolation. Weeds grow among the cobbles in Meeting Street, where broken window glass lies thick, as though their way is strewn with jewels. With her key, Addie opens her aunt’s door. They pass beneath the Philadelphia gasolier of bronze and ormolu, its globes etched with sheaves she can make out in the moonlight streaming through a gaping hole in the roof. Its beams light a scene that makes her think about Miss Havisham’s. All the photographs, Blanche’s mother’s things, the water-swollen books open and facedown, the furniture in shards and splinters everywhere. Neither of them speaks a word. After one long look, Addie turns away and locks the door, and they go on their way.

  At the wharf, she feels his urgency increase. He has begun to pace.

  “Can you not sit with me and rest?”

  “Addie,” he says, as if he hasn’t heard, “I don’t know if we shall ever meet again. I regret the sorrow I have caused….”

  “Please, Harlan, please, my dear, don’t distress yourself.”

  “No,” he says, “no, Addie, let me speak. I’ve spent my life an angry man. I didn’t understand this, but these nights upon the wall, waiting in the dark, alone, for death…Even in my happiest hours, when I was jolly with my friends, joking and feting them at my expense, I was angry underneath. I’ve come to see it has to do with Father, the fact that he loved Jarry in a way that I could never gain no matter what I did. Father saw me as unworthy in some way I couldn’t understand or change, and so I came to seem—and, to this very moment, feel—unworthy to myself. And I lived forty years, almost forty-five, right up till the day he died, in the expectation that he would recognize his wrong and somehow make it up to me. I felt he owed me this, but now, Addie, just lately, pacing on the watch at night, I’ve come to see that, right or wrong, owed or spent, none of this shall ever be. He’s gone, and I’ve forgiven him. I forgive him everything with all my heart. Yet what I’ve come to see is that some wounds, though we forgive them, never cease to bleed….”

  And now, the signal lantern flashes on the water. Now, they hear the sound of oars.

  “I had a dream,” he tells her, rushing on. “We were in the bombproof. There were many with me, both the living and the dead, and there was something at the ceiling, Addie, like a cloud, dark blue, a dark blue cloud of swirling steam, and a voice spoke out of that cloud that no one else could hear. There was a spirit in the cloud and it spoke to me as I’m speaking to you now. In the dream, I understood the words, though I lost them when I woke. I only know they angered me, Addie. They were commandments of some sort I didn’t wish to keep, and I picked up a hammer and I threw it. It disappeared into the steam and did not fall back to earth again, and others saw, and still, no one believed…. No one believed….”

  “Captain DeLay?”

  “The boat is here,” he says. He pulls her to him hard, hard. “Good-bye, good-bye.” And he is gone, leaving Addie with a pounding heart. Forgetful of herself, she glances down in the water now and sees a pool of lamplight undulating there, and in that pool, a coal-black silhouette, still, wholly still, upon the softly tossing waves.

  “Who are you?”

  The figure doesn’t answer, and in this moment Addie has a strong, sudden premonition of death. Is it Harlan’s? Taking it so, she turns and walks back along the glittering path that leads through desolation and goes she knows not where.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  A cool exhalation from the river further softened the soft light as the car moved up the potholed drive under heavy branches draped with Spanish moss where cicadas whirred. And there—as Ransom pulled the battered Odyssey into the turnaround in back—in gray flannel slacks with a soft drape and tasseled Italian loafers of some gleaming, welted skin, was Marcel Jones, pushing his children—Ransom’s children—on the swing.

  “Hey, Doddy, hey!” At the zenith, Charlie launched himself into the blue. “To Fininity Amboyon!”

  On reflex, Ran made an aborted lunge, like a receiver toward a Hail Mary pass he knew he’d never catch. Charlie, however, touched down without incident and ran on, unaware he’d skirted death. When Ran knelt to receive him, his son pressed the new Buzz Lightyear laser on his wrist instead, painting a red dot between his hapless father’s eyes. “Not today, Zurg!” he said, making his voice big and plangent, and his cheeks, Ran noticed, with a pang of helpless love, were strawberries and cream, as flushed and pretty as a girl’s. His blink—where was that? Ran had almost started to develop an affection for that blink, but bangzoom, it was outta here, and in a single night! Even a man of stronger psychic constitution than himself would have found it difficult to read these signs and conclude anything but that his absence had been beneficial to his son.

  “Hi, Hope!”

  She looked up at his hail, noting Shanté’s presence with mild curiosity.

  “Hi, Daddy…” Her voice was both familiar and brand-new, disengaged in a way he’d never heard from Daddy’s Little Girl before. Otherwise unmoved by his return, she went on twisting in her swing alone, back and forth, and forth and back, like four-year-old Ophelia plaiting a sad crown of rue. Her lips moved silently as she took a saltless pretzel from her bag and offered it to the unseen creature she was talking to.

 
; A single night, and Ran, once more, had fallen years behind the curve.

  A weirding light had fallen in the park, and Claire was out the back door now, moving hurriedly to intercept. Drying her hands on a white cloth, she was wearing her cutoff overalls and a black Lycra tank, and she was barefoot and so beautiful he knew he stood no chance. He’d come prepared to throw himself upon the mercy of the court, but Claire’s frown—battle-hardened, weary, ready to march on, however far, however long—showed little sign of leniency, in fact, no leniency at all.

  Why did you come home? said Nemo. He hadn’t spoken in a while.

  Ransom shoved him back into the submarine and slammed the hatch. “Look who I brought.” He smiled, making an effort not to grind his teeth.

  “I appreciate your doing this,” Claire said forthrightly to Shanté. “I wish I could say I’m happy to see you.”

  “Well, I’ll be happy for us both.” Shanté spread her arms, and Claire stepped in.

  Ransom gave Marcel a look. “Do you need a hug, too?”

  Caught off guard, Cell laughed with an attractive, natural surprise. “I think I’ll pass, but thanks.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t offer.”

  With this, the conversational momentum ground to an apocalyptic halt.

  “Hope,” Claire said, falling back upon the children as a social crutch, something she was deeply critical of in others, “come meet Mommy’s friend.”

  “And Daddy’s friend,” Ran qualified.

  “Come meet Shanté,” said Claire.

  “Hi, Shanté,” Hope said. “I have a new dog.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “He doesn’t have one.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s imaginary,” Claire informed the group.

  “No, Mommy,” Hope corrected in her parsing and emphatic way. “He’s not. You see him, don’t you, Daddy?” She held the leash in her left hand, and her right opened slightly wider, following the contour of the head, stroking backward from the snout across the crown.