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

In the barren, under pines, on the soft straw before the cottage, a quilt is spread, and on the quilt, a child of one sits and plays alone. It’s the first time she’s seen the boy, and Addie, at a distance, stops and watches as he puts a block atop another and knocks both down and makes a crowing noise and claps his hands. Pleased with his success, he looks up at her with Percival’s and Jarry’s hazel eyes and the full, bee-stung, almost sybaritic lips that Addie only realizes in this moment Harlan and Clarisse both share. Both shared. His dark hair forms a cropped cap on his head, and he is neither black nor white, but somehow both and neither, and finally just himself. His expression sobers when he sees a stranger near, but he seems curious and without fear, and Addie becomes aware of a constriction in her chest, a hammering under her left ear, and then Clarisse is there—in her same white and purple calico—to sweep the child onto her hip and turn, as though to interpose herself between him and a threat.

And what was that brief constriction in her chest? What did Addie feel? Whatever it was, it’s faded now. Her expression, like Clarisse’s, hardens with dislike.

“They’ve just come to tell me Harlan’s dead.”

Clarisse’s dark eyes smolder. She makes no reply.

“He was killed in the retreat from Wagner—possibly by an exploding shell, or else he drowned. That’s all I know.”

Addie waits for a response, but it is only a fraction of a second before she knows there will be none. She starts to walk away and then turns back. “What is his name?”

“James.”

“James…”

“He is Harlan’s son.”

Addie briefly holds her stare, then turns her back and goes.

“He’s Harlan’s son!” Clarisse shouts after her.

The shout fades. Now there’s nothing but the sound of Addie’s soft tread through the pines.

The effort this has cost steals on her suddenly. Realizing how tightly something in her core is clenched, she tries to breathe and let it go. She leans against a tree and drops her head, and then she sees her hand, so pale and soft against the ridged, dark bark, and they seem part of the same thing. She looks around. She’s at the water meadow now. Was this the place? Then it was spring, now it’s fall, but there are tender ferns along the ground, and cardinal flowers, and looking down she sees the vine, the partridgeberry Jarry said the old people call lovers’ vine. Then, it was covered with white flowers with the scent of orange blossoms. Now, they’ve succeeded to the fruit. Mixed among the deep green leaves are scarlet berries, like pendant drops of blood. Lifting one, she sees the eyes, two of them, where the small flowers were that dropped and died. Something is upon her now, some lifted sense, and Harlan is clear before her mind, not as she knew him, but as he was on that first afternoon, frowning and blushing in the hall beside Clarisse, when the spiritual beauty of one in mortal pain shone in his face. That is who you were, she thinks, a man I glimpsed just once and barely knew. I loved you not, yet we were bound by marriage, history, class, a heavy iron chain, and what does it mean now? Oh, Harlan. You wanted to reform your life through me and failed against the odds you faced. I wronged you in marrying without love, and you wronged me. In the end, wrong balanced wrong, and you are gone, and I am free, and I have had the better of our fray.

Something is upon her now, some high and lifted sense, and she thinks, God has answered after all. He has answered me. His justice, which we trusted to protect the South, has defeated us instead. Everything we believed was wrong, and nothing, no one, was more wrong than I. Oh, Jarry. Jarry. I took my husband’s side against you. I was given such a gift and felt I had no right to it. I know what Percival meant now, for I, too, have missed my fate. What bound me to you was a breath, a golden breath, a vapor, and I chose the chain instead, against my heart’s true cry and what I knew was right. I chose against myself. And that is why you left me, is it not? Is it not?

She looks up at the canopies of the old trees that seem to have a grace and wisdom that surpass human understanding, then down into the water at her feet, where she sees her own reflection against a silhouette of bright blue sky.

And now the words come back….

At length, himself unsettling, he the pool

Stirred with his staff and fixedly did look

Upon the muddy water which he conned

As if he had been reading in a book….

And what has turned the poet’s thoughts to life away from death? As though a ghostly hand has brushed her back, the small hairs rise on Addie’s spine. I looked into the pool and saw myself, she thinks; then, stepping in, she doesn’t drown, she breaks her image up.

FIFTY

Claire handed Shanté the Mini Maglite from the cluttered necessaries drawer, and Shanté turned the beam into the pot, which was keeping vigil on the sideboard as before.

“So, what,” said Ran over his shoulder, floating the first breast into the lake of burning oil. “A wash pot, right? For cooking black-eyed peas?”

“Did you see what’s in the bottom?”

She stood aside and handed him the light. There, outlined in fresh new rust, was a faint design: a cross within a circle and several smaller marks scratched with a chisel or a nail.

“That must have oxidized,” Ran said. “I don’t think it was there before. What is it?”

“It’s a firma,” Shanté said. “In vodou, they’re called veves. In other traditions, sygills. This one’s Cuban, specific to Palo Mayombe, but in Zaire