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

covers her mouth, stifling something half a sob and half a scream. “My gardener. He’s back there killing all our cows! Can you not stop him?”

“You’d best keep out of the way,” he says, not looking at her now. “You won’t be harmed unless you interfere.”

“Who are you?” Addie screams. “What is your name? What are you doing with my rice?”

“James Montgomery. Colonel James Montgomery. Second South Carolina Volunteers. We’re requisitioning it.”

“Stealing it, you mean? How am I to feed my slaves?”

“You have no slaves, madam. We’ve come to liberate them.”

“How, by starving them? Please. Please! I beg you. I have three hundred people here to see to. This is all the bread I have to put into their mouths. This is wrong. I see the guilt of it upon your face.”

“You see what isn’t there.”

“Then look at me!” she shouts. “Will you not look at me? Do you not have a mother or a sister? Do you not have a wife? I am a human being, just as they are. Can you not think of them and pity me?”

And now Montgomery turns on her. “You ask for a consideration you did not extend to whose whom you enslaved. You caused this war, you people here. Do you not know what you are fighting for?”

“I’m fighting to survive!” she cries. “And for my home!”

“You fight for your home only in the second instance,” he says, with the cold relish of a rhetorician, who won’t deny himself the pleasure of a righteous victory in argument, even in a scene like this, “because in the first you fought to perpetuate the freedom to oppress. This rice, this barn, this house, this land—all was made or purchased with illegally extorted labor and is forfeit as fruit of the poison tree. And, no, to answer your question, I don’t see you as human like my mother or my wife. You, the Southern slaveowners, brought this on yourselves and all of us, including many of my comrades, who’ve drenched Virginia with their blood and won’t go home to see their mothers or their children or their grieving wives again. If you want pity, ask it of Almighty God. I have none to give.”

“But can you not leave my Negroes something to eat?”

“I suggest you feed them beef.”

With this sober quip, he turns and paces off, his hands still clasped behind his back—like a grim prelate, Addie thinks; then, hearing screams, she runs toward the house. In the library, flames are running up the ivied drapes like orange squirrels up a tree. Addie tears them down and stamps on them. Books are scattered on the floor. The partners desk has been ransacked, the drawers all out and broken. Downstairs, she can hear men shouting angrily and battering the cellar door.

Another scream. It’s Tenah, from upstairs…. Addie finds her in the bedroom, on her bed, skirts raised, legs forced up around a man, a white staff sergeant, with muttonchops like Harlan used to have and a dimple in his chin so deep it looks as if it’s been indented by a pencil that deposited its lead. His striped trousers at his ankles, he’s humping her with brutal and efficient speed, while Tenah ineffectually beats his chest and bites her lip and weeps. His musket, with the mounted bayonet, leans against the bedpost, and his left fist holds a crocus sack half filled with swag.

“Get off her!” Addie shouts.

“Damn you, bitch!” Startled, he withdraws, stumbling over his dropped trousers as he tries to pull them up. “Ain’t you never heard of knocking? I thought y’all was supposed to have such fine manners here.”

Recovering his confidence, he laughs, swigging from a bottle of Harlan’s good Málaga.

“Come here,” Addie says, and Tenah, like a cat, is off the bed.

“Hold on, now, we ain’t finished here.”

“Tenah, go downstairs.”

The sergeant smiles and shakes his head. “You ain’t real obedient, are you, dear.”

Noticing the sterling lady’s set, he tries to put the brush into his sack, but fails to open it with both hands full. “Get over here and help.” He gestures loosely with the gun.

“What’s this?” With his little finger, he fishes Addie’s mother’s pearls out of a dish. “These’ll look all right on my old woman, don’t you guess?”

When Addie makes a grab, the string breaks and they ping on the floor and roll away in all directions.

“Pick ’em up,” the sergeant says, in the tone of a reasonable man proffering a reasonable request.

“I won’t.”

He holds her stare, smiling as he takes her measure. “Put that mirror in my bag.” He nods to the dressing table.

Addie picks it up and smashes it on the chair.

The punch is so hard and swift she feels her jaw unhinge, and she is lying on the floor, feeling stunned and thick. She tries to rise, but it’s as if her limbs are bound with tiny threads, like Gulliver. She thinks about the spirit pressing down on her in bed…. But that was just a dream. A dream…Is this?

The man is on her now, ripping at her clothes, her white and purple dress. She feels his calloused hand on her bare breast and smells his breath, sweet wine and throw-up.

“What is it you think to get?” she whispers in his tufted ear. “What is it you think to get by this?”

“Shut up,” he says calmly, punching her again. “Just shut up, bitch, and spread your legs.”

He’s in her now, and Addie turns her head away. On her face, her frown is carved as deeply as a mask’s. She feels a pang of grief and pity, the sort you feel for someone else. There’s a patch of sunlight on the floor, a slanted rectangle, warm and yellow, rich. It’s just beyond her fingertips, and in that light, a pearl. She thinks about it, warm against her mother’s skin the day she walked into the sea. There’s radiance upon the top of it, and down below it casts a shadow on itself. A brilliant, checkered thing that casts