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

September sky with the great ships of cloud that come back every fall. I never loved him, Addie thinks, watching as they sail away. How sad…how sad that is….

“In the evacuation…,” Jules is telling her when she comes back.

“The evacuation…”

“Of Wagner, Addie, yes, the night before last. The order came from Charleston. Motte…You know my cousin, Motte, I think….”

“Yes, slightly.”

“He was able to secure the steamer, Sumter, to assist in taking off the men. They were primarily of the Twentieth South Carolina and the Twenty-third Georgia, and it was after dark to avoid the Union guns. Captain DeLay volunteered to remain to spike the howitzers. It was dangerous duty. Their sappers, by then, were no more than forty feet outside our ditch, and would’ve swiftly overrun the fort had they suspected our retreat. The garrison marched up the beach in silence, without light, to Battery Gregg, where the transports took them off. I don’t know a great deal more. Captain DeLay was in the final group to board. Motte saw him in the stern, looking back over the rail as the shells arced down on Wagner from the fleet. He asked me to tell you that. Motte then went forward to the pilothouse, and Harlan—Captain DeLay—wasn’t seen again. They were almost at Sumter, perhaps a half mile off, when there came a flash from Sullivan’s. Motte first thought it was a signal flare, and then here came the ball, he said, skipping through the waves and raising streaks of spray. The first shot missed, but then the whole battery opened up. The boat took several fatal hits and rapidly began to sink. There was great confusion, men shouting, running, stripping down to jump into the sea…. It’s shoal there, no more than shoulder deep, but the tide was running hard to sea. Those who were able waded off to get out of the fire. After fifteen or twenty rounds, the gunners at Moultrie realized their mistake and held fire, but the garrison was stranded there all night in the sea. At dawn, as they were being carried off in boats, they came under Federal fire. Captain DeLay was not among their number when they mustered at the fort.”

“What happened? Where…”

“I wish I had an answer. The truth is, we don’t know. The stern quarter took a direct hit from the Parrott guns. That’s where Motte last saw your husband. It’s his belief that Captain DeLay was killed by that shell. He was never seen after they entered the water.”

“Could he not have swum…”

“Some did. Sumter was the nearest point of land, but Captain DeLay wasn’t with them, nor was he seen. I know how tempting it can be, Addie, when there’s any thread of hope, to cling, but it’s Motte’s belief and Colonel Graham’s, as well as mine, that Harlan perished. The overwhelming likelihood is that he was killed instantly, and though it’s no comfort to you now, I believe in time you’ll come to see that a swift death is merciful. A brave mission successfully accomplished, the hope of coming home, of seeing you and Wando Passo once again—he had this, I expect, before his mind, as his last thought. That’s as good a death as any man can have.”

“But to be killed by his own guns!”

Now Poinsett frowns. “It was a mistake.”

“A mistake!”

“Would that these things never happened, but in war they do. The gunners at the fort saw a boat proceeding through the harbor without lights and fired, according to their standing orders. Those men at Moultrie knew him, Addie, they were Harlan’s friends, many of the Twenty-first. I know they would do anything to call back those shells.”

“But they can’t.”

“No, they can’t.”

But it can’t be, she thinks, surely life can’t be as tenuous, as fragile, as contingent upon accident as this. And then, as Jules stands up to take his leave, a momentary panic overtakes her. Oh, don’t go, she thinks. What do I do now? Tell me what to do! And then she stares into his eyes, which have the same look she saw in Harlan’s at the Mills House in July, when she last saw him—the last time!—the look of one who has beheld a secret he must keep from you and for you, but Addie knows the secret, too: that it’s possible, and not only possible, but easy, to die without ever having lived. The thought of Percival is so strongly with her now…. “I searched through all these books, and never found an answer….” And this is what she wants from Jules right now: for him to tell her how to live, and she looks into his face and thinks, Poor man, you know no more than I….

“And what will happen now?” she asks. “Will Charleston fall?”

“We’ll hold out as long as we can. Our best hope now, I think, is that the peace party at the North may prevail in the election and sweep Lincoln and his minions out of power. Then, perhaps, we can make an honorable peace and have our independence.”

“Personally, I shall pray for swift defeat.”

“Good afternoon, Mrs. DeLay,” he answers, coolly, standing up. “I have other duty to perform.”

Ah, thinks Addie, who?

“Thank you for informing me,” she says, like someone speaking rote lines from a play that she lost interest in long ago.

And Jules is gone, and the air, the lifted sky, the ships of cloud, the September light—this no longer comforts her. It’s like the air at the summit of some high peak, and it’s strange, having never loved her husband, how hard it is, for the next thirty minutes or an hour, for her to breathe that thin, cold air and want to live. Strange, too, how swiftly Addie’s done with grief.

I must tell Clarisse, she thinks. Resistance boils up in her heart, but breeding overcomes it, and this is the best part of what she learned in Mme Togno’s school and at Blanche’s knee: that, however hard it is, you must never cease to