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

Addie’s protest. Then, over his, she joins him. All work at a fevered pace while the river rises, rises. They’re jubilant when it holds. Around a fire, they eat their midday dinner out of piggins and remove their boots and dry their stockings, and then Addie sends the crew home. She and Jarry walk the fields, where she’s had the plowmen turning in the winter rye and oats.

“What did these fields yield this year?” he asks.

“Not quite twenty bushels to the acre.”

He turns to her. “Not quite twenty…”

“Seventeen, I think,” she says reluctantly. “I’ve often thought about your forty bushels, Jarry. Frankly, I fail to see how it’s possible, but I’ll do whatever you suggest.”

He walks down a row and pulls a weed that doesn’t yield. He turns to her. “May I show you something?”

Sweeping aside the new-turned dirt, Jarry shows her a foot-wide swath of rock-hard clay the plow has missed. There’s a swath like this on each side of the furrow he points out, as there is, skillfully concealed, on every furrow in the twenty-acre field.

“You see what they’ve done,” he tells her, in a tone that’s settled, gentle, unsurprised. “They’ve plowed half the square—less than that, a third—in a third the time, and done a third the job and covered up the rest to make it look as though they’d done it all.”

“I didn’t know.”

“How would you?” Jarry says. “They’re perfectly aware you didn’t. They’ve taken deliberate advantage. It makes me, frankly, angry.”

“What are we to do?”

“One option is to punish them. That’s what they expect, what they’re accustomed to. Do this, and things will go on as before, the way they always have.”

“What would you do?”

He frowns and walks away, in conflict.

“Jarry, if I haven’t said this, I’ve often thought, and felt, this land is far more yours than mine. Your father owned it. You worked it almost thirty years, as I have done for not quite three. Even by that measure, you’ve ten times more right to it than I.”

“It’s yours in law.”

“What is that to you and me?”

They hold each other’s eyes across the distance now, as afternoon declines, and she goes up to him and takes his ice-cold hands. “One day, Jarry, I shall have my aunt’s Charleston house. I shall have her things. I’ll be well off, if not rich, and there’s a rightness, an entitlement, I feel to have what’s been passed down by my people through our line. I’d be hurt and disappointed not to receive these things. By that same measure, that same rightness, I feel Wando Passo is and should be yours. You must believe me. I, too, have given thought to this. Were you to tell me now, ‘Addie, there are three hundred people on this place and each of them, including you, should have the three-hundredth part,’ I’d have the papers drawn.”

“I wouldn’t accept that for myself.”

“What, then, would you accept?”

“All right,” he says, and now he paces off. “All right…” He’s agitated now, intense, when he turns back. “There are eleven hundred acres, give or take, at Wando Passo. If it were mine? If it were me?”

“Yes?”

“Beard Island contains four hundred acres. Four hundred and eighteen, I believe. Except for the two squares on the creek, it’s mostly pineland. There’s good timber there, and pasturage. The soil is rich.” He paces toward her, and away again, and Addie feels her heart begin to lift, with what, she hardly knows. “If this place belonged to me?”

“Yes?”

“I’d cede it to the people in the street. No, I’d sell it to them for a dollar, so they might possess the whole in fee. I’d have it surveyed, Addie. I’d have it platted out in lots. If there are fifty families in the quarters now…?”

“Something like…”

“And perhaps the same number living by themselves?”

“About.”

“I’d assign the families five-acre lots, the individuals two or three, however it works out. These, I’d assign by lottery, so that no one should be unfairly advantaged over anybody else. Out of this, I should reserve a common area along the riverfront. The eighteen acres? There would be a wharf, a church, a school, a dry goods store, whatever may be needful. Those who wish to leave might sell their parcels to those who choose to stay. I should allow them to remain in present quarters till they’re prepared to build their homes. When they move, I should allow them to tear down the cabins and salvage what they can in terms of boards and doors and fittings for reuse. What more materials they need, they shall supply themselves with timber from the land they clear or profit from the sale of it. And all this shall be paid for out of rice.”

“Which they shall rent?”

“Exactly. You shall continue to own the squares,” he says, “and they shall do the labor, just as they do now. You’ll furnish land and seed rice, tools and teams, which you will also feed, and half the profit shall be yours, the other half to them. Only, Addie, listen…. Though you shall have but half of what you have and had before, there’ll be no more of this….” He kicks the turned dirt in the row. “Nomore of this subversion, this resistance. Instead of half this field, the third, they’ll plow it all. And so, instead of all of seventeen and twenty bushels to the acre, you’ll have the half of forty and forty-five, and they’ll have a stake in making every field bear every grain of rice it can. Each man’s and woman’s participation in the profits will be according to the hours they put in, the work they do, and for the first time, they’ll have homes on land they own. They’ll buy their teams of oxen next, and then a cow, then a horse and buggy. As they prosper, so will you. And those, like Paul and Wishy, with a trade? They’ll build homes while the homeowners work the fields, and they’ll be paid in bartered rice,