Back to Wando Passo by David Payne (books to improve english txt) 📕

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 that 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