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

Clarisse…or someone out there murdered and buried in a hole. What if history’s repeating?”

Claire stared him down. “You know what, Ran? You’re out of your mind. You’re in the middle of a full-blown episode, and I’m sorry, Shan, you’re my friend and I know you mean well—I have to believe that—but this vodou bullshit is just egging him on.”

“You’re my friend, too, Claire,” Shan replied evenly, “but this is very serious, and you don’t know the first thing about it.”

“And I don’t want to either.” She started to get up, but Marcel held her—not held, just lightly laid his hand across her arm. “What?” Claire said. “You’re buying this?”

“If Shanté says it’s real, I think we ought to listen.”

Claire gazed into his eyes, considering.

Watching this, Ran felt as though he’d been served his liver on a plate.

“So how do you propose to do this, Shan?” said Cell. “How do you propose to get the answers to these questions?”

Shanté shrugged. “I don’t have an instruction manual, Cell. Ask, would be my guess.”

“Ask who?” said Claire. “The spirit? How do you pose questions to a ghost?”

“We go to the graveyard,” Shanté said. “We go to the graveyard in the morning, Claire, and cross our fingers, and hope like hell they’ll answer us.”

FIFTY-ONE

There are three bedsheets laid out on the forest floor—on the first, pine straw and cones and little ferns lifted, undisturbed, with squares of soil; on the second, paler subsoil; on the third, the grayish-yellow clay, some of which will not go back into the hole that Addie, with Old Peter’s help, digs to hide the silver chest. She’s meant to do this for some time, and why, suddenly, today? Who knows? Addie woke up to the honk of geese above the house, and it seemed important to delay no further. This is where they are—they’ve dragged the third sheet to the edge and thrown the clay into the pond (a single clod of this, a grain, can give it all away)—when they hear the low drone of an engine on the river. Sultan, Harlan’s hound, begins to bark. There’s a distant sound—tat…tat…ratah…tah…tat—so toylike, how could it portend anything of consequence?

When they come out on the road, there’s great activity in the barnyard. Addie, for a moment, can’t make heads or tails. There’s something off in the perspective—it’s as if she’s come to the wrong house—and then she realizes an enormous boat, a ship almost, is moored at her dock, eclipsing her accustomed view of riverfront. U.S.S. Mendota she reads across the bow, and now, for the first time, she’s afraid. There are men she doesn’t know—black men in blue coats, with bayoneted muskets—moving here and there, striding purposefully, while her people stand and watch with troubled eyes. A small bareheaded man with a revolver stops by the dairy yard and stares in at the bony cows. After a moment’s contemplation, he raises his gun and shoots Patch in the head. Patch, who calved last spring, goes down on her hocks and knees, and then he fires again, and she collapses like a sack of rocks.

“No,” Addie whispers. Her hand goes to her breast. Now he shoots another. “No!” she shouts, and starts to run. Hogs squealing, the sound of breaking glass…At the kitchen house, a man pulls Minda from the door and throws her to the ground. Black smoke billows from the window. They’re on the house porch, too. The scene is like an anthill that’s been overrun by a competing swarm.

“What are you doing?” Addie asks the little man, who stares at her with tranced bug eyes, red with sun and drink. “Those cows are for our children’s milk.”

As though he doesn’t hear, he puts the barrel to her head and pulls the trigger. Click. Click, and click again.

“Goddamn,” he says. “Gotdamn.” He backhands her across the mouth and knocks her down, then, cursing all the while, reloads.

When he raises the gun to fire again, Peter steps between. “You,” he says, pointing his finger in the man’s face, his voice trembling with fear and outrage. “You, I know you. You Musta Aw’ston’s from Hasty Point. You let her ’lone, yeddy?”

“I ain’t no one’s, Daddy,” says the bug-eyed man. “I free. Free as a frog. Free till I fool. I belong to me.”

“Look here—”

Now the tat is close and loud and big. Blown back against the fence, Peter crumples like a paper thing. Addie sees brain spatter hit the rail and drip onto its owner’s cheek, the blood bright against the pale green lichen on the slat, like the scarlet berries on the partridgeberry vine. The little Negro stares at Peter, bug-eyed with wonder at his accomplishment, then, bug-eyed, at his gun, the smoking instrument. A half smile on his lips, he catches Addie’s eye as though inviting her to share in the exquisiteness of what he’s done, the wonder that he is. Somberly, she waits to die, but he’s lost interest, or rather thinks the cows are better sport. Turning to the dairy yard again, he resumes his work, shooting down the great, slow animals, who are lowing now in terror, methodically, one by one.

Addie, on her feet, runs toward the barn, and when she comes around the side, she finds Oliver and several others rolling tierces down the bank toward the boat. They’re being held at gunpoint by Federal Negro troops, while a white officer, a stooped man with a hook nose and a lined and whiskered face, looks on. When she appears before him, frantic and disheveled, he regards her with mild curiosity. There’s no surprise at all in his gray eyes. With no change of expression, he goes on observing, hands clasped behind his back as though attending a review.

“For the love of God, help me!” she cries. “Are you in charge?”

“I am.”

“One of your men just shot my…” And, oh, it hits her now…Peter, gentle Peter, with his fragole Alpine, Peter with his cymbelines! Bending double, Addie