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

and so with all of them—the carpenters for building, the boatmen for hauling freight, the butterers and poultriers for buttering and poultrying, and there will be enough. And Clarisse…She’s Father’s child as much as I.”

“That’s so,” Addie concedes, but something in her stiffens now.

“If it were me, Addie, I’d give her title to the Cuban property.”

“Yes,” she says. “Yes,” says Addie, with relief.

“That’s where she belongs. She can live there handsomely. I have no wish for it.”

“Nor I.”

“This is the dream I’ve long had in my heart.”

“And us?” she asks. “What are we to be to each other in this scheme?”

“I don’t know,” he answers. “I suppose you’ll own the seven hundred acres that remain. I suppose I’ll run it and be paid a wage.”

“That’s not acceptable to me,” she says. “I think Wando Passo should be yours.”

“That does not sit right with me.”

“What does?”

“Half to you and half to me.”

“Then let us have the papers drawn.”

“We can’t draw papers till the laws have changed. But I’ll take your hand on it.”

“Then here it is.”

And in that frozen, half-plowed field this afternoon, December fifteenth, 1864, while the light is fading, as the sunset comes, bloodred, in a haunting winter sky with tones of lavender and palest green, they stand face-to-face, with cold-flushed cheeks and watering eyes, and shake with hands like icicles. Then they go. Their boots crackle the thin ice, and Jarry helps her as she leaps the quarter ditch. They climb the dike and paddle home and light the lamp.

And what Addie did not imagine either, what she could never have anticipated, is that it would be this—not some soulful look exchanged over a book of poems, but a handshake in a field, a contract, honor made and bound, that would sweep away his final reticence, that love would come from this. But so it is.

As they share their quiet supper, Jarry puts aside his fork. “I must tell you something, Addie….”

“Yes?”

“There’s a feeling in my heart tonight, a fullness I have never…”

“Dearest!” She goes to him and takes the chair beside his own.

“I’ve never known before,” he says. “I’ve had feelings for you, Addie, almost from the start, and I’ve felt, or hoped, that you had some for me.”

“I have. You know I have.”

“But what I didn’t know, what I did not believe, deep down, till now, was that there could be justice…justice…. I can’t put in simpler words what that is tome….”

“I know what justice means.”

“I know my father loved me, I know he loved as deeply as he could, but he could never give me, Addie, what you’ve given me today, and a part of me has been in pain and bleeding over it, all this time, all these many years. I can’t recall a time that I was ever happy without some sorrow mixed in it, but tonight for the first time…”

“Tonight?”

He smiles and shakes his head. “It’s gone. If I should only live to see this done, I’ll die a happy man.”

“Do you know what I feel?” she asks.

“What?”

“All my life, since I was young, I’ve been waiting for something, Jarry, waiting for my true life to start, and it has, it did long ago…. There it was in front of me, and it was you, you, Jarry, all along…. All I could think was it was a bewitchment. I’m so sorry for my blindness.”

“If you were blind, then so was I,” he says. “It doesn’t matter now. I love you as I’ve loved no one, as I shall love only one time.”

“And so it is for me.”

She holds out her hand—there’s no need for more—and they go upstairs to bed. And as Addie blows the candle out tonight, and on the succession of nights that follow this and seem that they will never end, what she comes to in herself is that the wisdom of the girl of seventeen—which said Evangeline must wait for Gabriel however long it takes, no matter what—is finally truer than the wisdom of the bride of thirty-three that said get on with it and live. And no one taught her this—not social Charleston, not her aunt, not MmeTogno’s school. Addie learned this lesson for herself.

And Christmas comes. She sits on the piazza, hands folded in her lap, as Jarry talks and tells the people the agreement they have reached. They’re solemn as they listen, but that night in the quarters it is Jubilee…. And New Year’s Day, when they walk the squares after the plowmen leave, there are no weeds left, no unturned earth between the rows. And the ewes lamb in February—there are thirty-six!

And on April thirteenth, a Thursday, finally comes the news—Lee, gallant Lee, has surrendered at Appomattox Court House. At intervals through that sad day, the tidings come—Selma captured…Mobile…Joe Johnston has surrendered his command. And, then, oh, at breakfast, Lincoln dead, and Seward…shot! Rumors spread that every man above the rank of captain in the Confederate army will be hanged, but the smuggled papers out of Baltimore say Beecher pleads for mercy on the South. And as the world outside the gate collapses into ruin, within, the April rice is clayed, the herring run upstream, the dikes erupt in flower—violets, blackberries, the blue and yellow jessamine. The women sow, walking with that lovely swing they have, down the rows, bent over, their skirts hiked, singing as they go.

And in Maytime, when the rice is under the Long Water, coming into milk, in the time of the singing of birds, one morning Addie sees something different in the dressing table mirror, and she looks down, both hands on her stomach, realizing what is there. She’s four months pregnant when the harvest starts, and they go through the fields with reap-hooks, tying up the cocks with wisps and leaving them to dry tonight before they tote them to the flats.

Through that spring and summer, the roads are full of men, straggling back home from Virginia, barefooted, some of them, with nothing to eat except a pocketful