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

a shadow on itself…That’s what human beings are. This is the thought in Addie’s mind. She’s gone into a dream, and in this dream, she hears a voice she knows.

“Get off,” it says.

“Nigger, wait your turn.”

Now the rifle butt comes down, and the sergeant with the dimple in his chin rolls off with a deep groan.

And now, in Addie’s dream, it’s Jarry looking down at her. His face is large and soft.

“Is it you?” she whispers.

“I looked everywhere for you,” he says. “I tried to stop it. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Reaching to cover herself, her hands can’t manage it. She flushes hot with shame, and he averts his eyes.

“I should not have left.” Squatting on his hams, Jarry lurches forward, then sideways.

“Jarry, what is it? What’s wrong?”

Falling over on his seat, he looks down at his breast, and something presses up his coat, like a finger working underneath, and then the blood begins to spread.

“That’ll teach you, nig.” On his knees, the sergeant withdraws the bayonet with a wet sissh.

Jarry fumbles for his sidearm, but his right arm flops. He looks at Addie with such grief and such apology; then there’s a roar. The sergeant flies back against the wall, and there is Tenah with the Purdey in the door.

Jarry sits against the bedpost, with his hand over his breast like a boy making a pledge.

“Jarry?”

He opens his eyes and looks at her. There’s a wet gurgling as he pants, like someone with the croup.

“Miss, the Rebs is in the yard,” says Tenah.

“Quick, get some of Harlan’s things.”

There are shouts below, and gunfire, as they change Jarry’s pants and shirt. Footsteps on the stair, and Jules Poinsett walks in with a LeMat revolver in his hand.

“They said there was one up here.”

“There he lies,” says Addie, nodding to the dead man.

“And who’s this?”

“My steward, Jarry.”

Poinsett frowns at her and then at Tenah. “Come now, it’s well known hereabouts your steward ran off years ago and sided with the Yanks.”

“He saved my life, Jules. Please. Are you not tired of death?”

Poinsett stares at her with a severe and monumental frown, as if making up his mind. “Your name meant something in this country once,” he says, and walks out of the door.

FIFTY-TWO

Ran’s knife, put down too hard, clanked on his plate. “So, what’s the plan?” he asked the others, whose chicken lay, like his, wounded, if at all, only in a polite, pro forma way. “Are we going to sit here looking glum all night, or does anybody want to hear my song?” He looked at Claire, but she declined to leap into the breach.

“I’d love to hear it,” Shanté said.

Ran turned to Cell.

“Why not?” the big man said. “Let’s hear your song.”

In the library, he took his vintage Gibson from the thicker case. A J-45 from 1946, it had been purchased long ago in Nashville on the strip and had another life before it came to him, a life that Ransom sometimes, catching fire, fancied he could channel through the strings. With its top of proudly pick-scarred sitka spruce, its mahogany sides, the mother-of-pearl bridge dots on its rosewood frets, it was the first truly fine guitar he’d ever owned, the one he held on to through the years as a dozen others came and went, the one he still loved best. If the electric in the thinner case—a 1960 Les Paul ’Burst—was Ransom’s mistress, the old acoustic was the one Claire meant when she called it—half joking…but only half—“the wife.”

Slipping his pick from between the strings, he turns a nickel peg or two, correcting tune, and plays the first few bars experimentally. Even in his mind, Ran has yet to hear the song this way, unplugged, and has to find the stresses, reinvent the slower rhythm as he goes. After a moment, he puts the pick away and begins to finger in a style he learned from the greatest blues picker of them all, Mississippi John Hurt, whom Ransom, in his youth, paid homage to as devotedly as ever did Palero to the muerto in his pot. The old black man gave him master lessons from beyond, and it is to this heritage, this devotion, that Ransom reaches back tonight, and underneath the madcap surface, his song reveals a sadder, unexpected undertone, a blue-lit gloom like undersea, as Ransom sings:

“In the submarine of creation Captain Nemo

can be found kicking ass and taking names.

I ought to know ’cause he impressed me deeply

and I attended boot camp in his brains.

It never rains down here; there isn’t any weather.

On maneuvers, blind fish osculate our masks.

I’d like to know their taxonomic listings,

but I fear Nemo would torpedo if I asked.

It’s not that he’s a tyrant or a monster—

in fact, he’s like a father to us all.

It’s just that loneliness has made his heart ferocious,

and he’s grown deaf to any softer call.

When it began, nobody can remember.

No doubt at the beginning: one fine day

the surface world collapsed around his longing,

the deep world yawned and took his life away.

And he dove after it with righteous passion,

But after twenty years he knew it wasn’t there.

Then he stopped caring and a change came over him:

he learned to breathe the sunless element like air.”

Under the high ceilings, amid the walls of books, Ransom holds the room, reminding each of them what they all know and frequently forget, that sadness, slightly lifted, slightly shaped, is at the heart of every beauty, and loss the central subject of all art. He speaks both for the living, who are present, and for the dead, those who sat here once—who loved their lives as fervently as these do here tonight, found it as inconceivable that they might end—and they are gone. And is it any truer, is it more plausible, to say that it is intuition, something in himself that Ransom owns, than spirit voices, beings outside Ran and greater than himself, that lift him now and whisper