by David Payne
“His plan is succeeding brilliantly,” she says. “Everyone else along the river is struggling, and we’ve had the best crop in ten years. Forty bushels to the—”
“You haven’t answered me,” he says. “What plan? Who’s driving puncheons? Where? For what?”
Her expression drops to one of sober candor now. “I’ve ceded them the island, Harlan.”
“You have what…Beard Island, do you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Ceded it to whom?”
“The slaves.”
“The freedmen,” Jarry says.
Harlan blinks at them in turn, incredulous. “Have you, then, lost your minds? On what authority have you done this?”
“The authority you gave me in your will.”
“And here I am, alive, so that is null and void, and there’s the end of it.”
“But, Harlan,” Addie says, “I gave my word. They’ve worked this whole season on that understanding. They’ve cut timber, started homes. The church is framed. The steeple’s on. The puncheons are in for the new wharf. They’ve done this in my name, upon my promise that the land and half the profits from the rice are theirs.”
“And you expect me to accede? These Negroes, half my wealth, have just been confiscated by the same government that allowed my father to acquire them legally, stolen from me at a single stroke of a tyrant’s pen, and now you want me to cede, what, a third of what’s left to me in land to them in exchange for…what? As a reward for their loyalty? As a courtesy? To celebrate the destruction of our state, our country, our hopes, our way of life? You’re a goddamned fool, Addie, a greater one than I took you for. You’ve lived your life in books, where noble heroes make foolhardy gestures such as this, ruining themselves and casting their children into penury. But in real life, no one acts this way or ever will. Starting from this moment, the niggers—the ‘freedmen’—can live in the cabins, which I own and formerly provided gratis, and they may pay me rent. They may work the rice for wages and buy the food I once put into their mouths for free. If they don’t like it, let them leave. After all, they’re free. Their savior, Lincoln, has emancipated them, and you see how his perfidies have been rewarded…. Booth, you know…They killed him, but thousands more will spring up in his place. You say the war is over, Addie, but you’ll soon have cause to know that’s not the case.”
“Come, man,” says Jarry now, “you can’t be serious. You’ve been defeated. At least show the character to admit you’ve lost.”
“What I admit,” Harlan rejoins, “is that my country is under occupation by a hostile foreign power.”
“But Davis himself signed the armistice,” Addie says.
“Jefferson Davis is a traitor and a coward. He betrayed our cause. Many of the notables of our government are in Mexico right now. They’ve made a treaty with the emperor Maximilian. One day, they’ll march north and free us from our occupation.”
“With what?” asks Jarry. “A dancing master and an orchestra? Will they waltz the government of the United States into submission?”
“You laugh now, Jarry. Now you’re in the catbird seat. But one day soon, one day very soon, men I know—patriots like Booth, who feel as he felt and I feel—will make you acquainted with a branch of sourwood and the end of a short rope. And when they come for you, the night they ride into this yard, we’ll see who’s laughing then. We’ll see what noises come from your black throat. And I’ll show you, then, on that day, all the brotherly love you now show me.”
Now Harlan gets his gun and goes to shoot.
“He’s insane,” says Jarry as they watch him stalk off through the park.
“Do you think he knows?”
“If he doesn’t, he will soon.”
“Oh my God, Clarisse!” Addie exclaims. “She’ll tell him, surely. What are we to do?”
“What is there to do, but tell him first?”
“Oh, but Jarry, I’m afraid,” she says. “I’m afraid for both of us.” She takes his hand and puts it on her stomach now. “Shouldn’t we just take the boat and go?”
“And the people?” Jarry asks. “Beard Island? Everything we promised them? All the work they’ve done? Are we just to leave them to their fates?”
“What else can we do? The will is void.”
Now, the first blast of the gun…Jarry stares in that direction, and his jaw is tight. “I won’t run anymore.”
And, oh, at those words, such a lonely pang shoots through her. “Then we shall die of it,” she says, and looks away.
“I could slip down there right now,” he says. “We could take him up some nameless creek….”
She looks him in the eyes and shakes her head. “No, you couldn’t. And even if you did, it would ruin everything. Let me tell him. It should come from me.”
And, in the house, as Addie goes to change the sheets, as she bunches them and holds them to her face to catch their scent, she listens to the Purdey’s repeated roar from the landing down below. On and on into the afternoon it goes, and the thought of Wordsworth runs through Addie’s mind. “We poets in our youth…We poets in our youth…” But she’s too anxious and the rest won’t come. All she remembers is the sense: It begins with poetry, and ends in death.
FIFTY-SEVEN
“‘Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.
“‘Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight, that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest and be clean when thou judgest…’”
Sitting in the chair, her back discreetly to him, Shanté reads as Ransom wrings the sponge over his head, letting the scented water runnel down his face, his chest, his sides, laying tracks down in the hair of his uncovered legs, drumming softly in the iron basin of the tub. The bathroom window is still black, except for twinned candle flames reflected in the eddies in the pane. Burning on the sill and on the pedestal, both are white and both have been reversed, with new tops carved. Each has been dressed from one of Shanté’s vials. “Uncrossing Oil,” the label says, and at the bottom, among the culch of seeds and roots, there is a broken link of chain.
“‘Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow….’”
Awakened at the partners desk, his head on his crossed arms, Ran followed Shanté to the kitchen, watching, somber-faced with sleep, as she poured herbs in river water she had boiled. There was a yellow flower in the mix, dried and drooping on its stem, head bowed like a discouraged child. Ransom wondered what it was but didn’t ask.
“‘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.’”
As she continues, he kneels and soaks up the spilled water at his feet and wrings it out again, washing, as instructed—“Up to draw,” she told him, “down to take away.”
“‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.’”
Nine times she reads the psalm, nine times he wrings the sponge. Then he collects the water in a basin, waiting, in the cool of morning, as gooseflesh forms, for the air to dry him. Then he dresses in white clothes—a T-shirt and a worn pair of chinos—and sets off down the allée, carrying the basin, barefoot and alone.
A saffron line, no wider than a pencil stroke, has appeared over the Pee Dee, and birds are singing in the yard.
As the sky lightens, Ransom knows what kind of day it is to be. It is that day. In Killdeer there was only one each year, when you walked outside and found that, overnight, the sky had lifted off. The air was clear, the humidity, gone. The smell of bright tobacco wafted from the warehouses on Depot Street downtown, and sounds carried—the ringing of the steeple bell of the First Methodist Church, and, sometimes, from the high school, the warlike whoops of boys and coaches on the football field, like soldiers reenacting some old charge
that ended in defeat and yet, each fall, must be remembered and repeated and remembered and repeated still once more. It was the day you knew—or Ransom did—that fall was here and summer gone and not coming back. The feeling in his heart today is the same as it was then—the loneliness of knowing things must end, the grief that stabs, yet Ransom glimpses far, far down—a flash, and nothing more—how the wound, along its edge, is touched with sacredness. And what is this? All these years, Ran has forgotten there was ever such a day as this, yet here, again, it is.
More than anything he’s ever wanted, more than anything he’s wanted in this life and on this earth, Ransom doesn’t want to have to think of what this feeling means.
And he is at the crossroads now. Waiting for a pickup truck to pass—the driver, an old white man in a beaten cap, gives him a suspicious look that Ransom meets, unsmiling—he proceeds to the middle, turns his back, and throws the water, with his essence in it now, over his left shoulder, east, toward the rising sun. And then, not looking back—as instructed by Shanté—he puts Alberta’s money in the box and returns the way he came.
In the yard, the excavator’s hole is bound by yellow tape. The Odyssey’s rear hatch is open. Shanté has taken out her things. Ran can see her, kneeling in the cemetery. With Claire’s garden trowel, she pours a scoop of graveyard dirt into the pot, and her lips move, praying as she works. He enters by the creaking gate, and she stands up and wipes her hands. “I guess it’s time.”
“I guess it is,” says Ran.
Uncovering her basket, with quick, effective violence, she takes out the black rooster she picked from her friend’s stall. As she hands the bird to him, it erupts with surprising fury, and in the flurry that ensues, Ran’s arm is scored and starts to bleed.
“Hold it upside down.”
When he complies, the rooster’s wings fall loose, its golden eyes grow tranced.
Untying the bundle, she places the palos, one by one, upright inside the pot. Standing behind her, holding the passive bird, Ran experiences a misgiving he hasn’t felt till now. When he bought the bird from Shanté’s friend, he told himself that it was just a chicken, after all, and how different, really, from going to the grocery and bringing home the pieces in Saran? Now, though, feeling its bony spurs against his fingers and thumb, the soft wing feathers brushing the tops of his bare feet, its body heat against his leg, the whiff of barnyard shittenness—all this drives home the fact that this is not a harmless game he has consented to. Here now, in the cool of morning, to take its life seems no small thing. Suddenly Ran is far from sure a game is not exactly what it is…if not that, an act of reckless, foolish hope.
From a carved box, Shanté has taken out a folded leopard pelt and draped her shoulders. Inside, Ran can see a pile of fine white ash with larger bits in it. There are dried plants, roots and snails, an armlet she slips on. Lifting a staff, she starts to speak.
“Do not be surprised to see us here today,” she says, speaking to the air, the old trees in the park, the mossy headstones, leaning silently. In her left hand is the staff; in her right, hanging at her side, the gleam of the thin knife…. “We come here to Makulu with offerings, to make Munkukusa, to confess and purify ourselves, so that we may be clean and righteous in your sight. This man, Ransom, and his family have been afflicted with grievances of which we do not know the cause. We come to ask how he has offended you and what it is you wish from him. He is lost, and we are lost, because we have forgotten you. Yet we know that you have not forgotten us. We know only that this pot was made, that you served its maker, and then were turned out in the anthill, consigned to wander restlessly, like them. Today, we call you to return into the nganga, which you see we have prepared for you. It is time for you to journey to Mpemba, to join your mwela there and to live among the bakulu forever. See, then, here is your wine….” And now she pours it on the ground, a splashing cross. “Here, the prenda, here, the menga…”
And now she turns, and with a brief, hard look in Ransom’s eyes, she grips his wrist and raises it. “Ensuso kabwinda.” As she draws the knife across the rooster’s throat, the blood spurts, hot, on Ransom’s cheek. “Embele kiamene…Eki menga nkisi…”
She forces him to hold the bird in place, over the pot, and the blood pours, swift at first….
Ahora sí menga va corre, como corre,
Ahora sí menga va corre, si señó,
Ahora sí menga va corre…
As she sings, her song is like something Ran remembers…some old lullaby someone sang him long ago. But who? There is an ache in Ransom’s throat, and an ineffable tenderness and pity well in him toward the bird. His misgiving, where is that? He doesn’t know. It simply is no more. And the blood is falling, menga va corre, como corre, not horrible, not horrible at all, but somehow connected to the day, this day, to the lifted sky, the lonesome feeling in his heart, the stab of mortal grief, the wound that, at its edge, is touched with sacredness. It is one and the same thing.
It is slowing now, dripping, drop by drop, over the palos, like a soft, warm rain falling in the jungle, running down the branches of the trees, over the stones onto the forest floor, into the black depths of the pot, where it mixes with the earth which itself is living, is human flesh and tissue, bone and blood, the thing that’s left, the thing that we become, and reaching the foundation, it touches the old sygill outlined in new white chalk.
“Now the firma is empowered,” Shanté says, and, turning, once more to the air, in a commanding voice: “Tell us who you are and what you want.”
And Ran, for one moment of unbearable suspense, allows himself to hope. And for that moment, as he waits—for what, he knows not—he closes his eyes and prays in silence, to the air, to the old trees in the park, to whatever power Shanté has called forth, and the prayer he says is, Give me back my life.
Now they wait. The moment of unbearable suspense, no longer than a thunderclap, has passed. And another. And the next one after that. And nothing happens. And Ransom, opening his eyes, knows now that nothing will, that nothing can, knows, too, deep down, that he has known this all along. This is all there is. His words come back.
Shanté takes a palm nut from her box and breaks it on the corner of a grave. Taking four pieces, she casts them on the ground, observing how they fall, whether with the white meat up or down. Murmuring to herself, she starts off down the rows, casting at the foot of every grave, and Ransom sits and watches. Demoralized and out of gas, he looks down at the legend in the stone:
CAPT. HARLAN P. DELAY
21ST SOUTH CAROLINA, C.S. A.
b. Dec. 8, 1820 d. Sept. 1, 1863
Fallen in Defense of Home and Country
Resting Now in Patient Hope
Of Resurrection
Back in the place he was before, having come full circle, Ran knows the answers to his questions now, knows what it was for Harlan, once upon a time, to walk into this park, into the dappled light that fell through the old oaks, as it falls now, and find his name carved on the new stone in the plot; knows what it was like to come home from that Northern prison, after months and years of suffering and privation, to find his wife had grieved and buried him and moved on with her life.
And the sight of Shanté at her work, the woman he once loved, who once loved him, moving grave to grave, observing how the pieces fall, the fact that she would make these efforts of belief on his account, touches Ransom deeply, but in the way that watching Hope or Charlie play some imaginary game might do. As he envies them their childhood, so he envies her her faith, but Ran himself does not believe at all.
It comes home now that all of this—bathing in the herbs and washing down not up, walking to the crossroads, pitching the pot of water over his left shoulder not his right, and east not west, toward the rising sun…all this, Palo, hoodoo, Conjure, Congo practice, spirits, magic pots, all are forms of flight that Ransom took from something that he couldn’t stand to face, couldn’t stand to bear or bear to stand, something in himself. And what was it, the
thing itself? It was his pain. It was the pain of human life. Somewhere Ransom had accepted, without ever knowing that he had, that he was too damaged, too afraid and weak, to bear that feeling in its raw and undiluted state, to hold it in his stomach and his chest, to bear it and still breathe, to bear it and still live, to hold it as he held the dying rooster, as he holds Charlie in the rocking chair at night, to hold it as he’d hold a dying child if there was nothing to be done except to gaze into his frightened eyes and be of comfort and stand what he must stand. But it is not a rooster, not a child that Ran is holding now. And when you awaken on that day, this day, when you experience the pain of being mortal, when you understand the dying animal, the dying child is you, that we are dying all the time, dying from the moment we are born, when you grasp that this is human life and it is all bound up with death—what then? What would you not do to escape? What price would you not pay to be spared? What drug would you not take?
It is that day now for Ransom Hill, and he has tried them all. He has fled through humor, wisecracks, affairs and feuds and busy-ness and business, through madness, music, alcohol, and art, even art, the place he’d tried hardest to be true…. And now the notion of a curse carried down the years inside an old black pot…All flight, evasion, fantasy. And why? Where had the break occurred? Where had he experienced the raw and undiluted thing, and opted out? Somewhere far back, far, far back, in childhood…an image of his father’s flying fists, of curling in a ball against the wall as blows rained down, of wanting not just them, but everything to end. Lying on the kitchen floor of that old shack in Bagtown, in the shadow of the great twin stacks, life, the core sensation, had become identified with pain for Ransom Hill, and he had wished that it might cease. How terrible and sad. And he has been in flight since then—how long has it been?