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

life.” Her blue eyes, which conceal nothing, film at this, and she takes his hand and presses it, and this is genuine on her part. But it’s a belated third or fourth response, and its belatedness does not escape her husband, whose hand remains as lifeless in her grip as his memory, these last two years, has been in Addie’s heart.

“You seem changed,” he offers. Studious, his eyes drop briefly from her face and then come back.

The blood rushes to her cheeks. “So do you! You are so thin, my dear! You are a rail. A very skeleton! Where did you go? Where have you been?”

“I was captured. I’ve been in prison.”

“Prison? But the papers said…”

“I’ve been in prison, Addie,” he repeats with a tolerating note, like a teacher reciting a rote lesson to a child.

And can he tell? she wonders. She’s four months now. It’s so obvious to her when she looks in the glass, but few have noticed yet. And Jarry, oh! He’s with the carpenters on the island and will be back any time. How can she get word to him? She can’t! And yet she must. What are they going to do? What is this going to mean? “Come, let us sit you down and put some food in you,” she says. “Let’s find some decent clothes.” (Jarry’s things are in the bedroom, though! His nightshirt, draped over the chair! And did she make the bed today? The sheets!)

“The birds are in the rice,” he says, gazing past her toward the river.

“There’s nothing but the gleanings left,” she answers, absent and preoccupied. “It’s in. We have almost forty bushels to the acre.”

“Where’s my gun?” he asks, as if he hasn’t heard.

“It’s in the house. But come and eat.”

And now she hears the gravelly click as he slings his single item of impedimenta on his back—a burlap sack with “08 25 lb” stenciled on its face, in black. She should know what this means, she thinks, reading it. But she does not. As they pass through the park, he stares at the charred foundations of the summer kitchen, overgrown with briars, encouraged by the fire; he frowns, but, otherwise, it occasions no response.

At the table, two places have been laid, and Addie quickly sweeps up Jarry’s plate and glass. She fetches bread and butter, jam—blackberry, from the canes that grow so thickly on the dikes. She spent the morning frying chicken, and before him now she sets the mounded plate. Harlan regards it like Franklin in Paris in his coonskin hat, surveying his first reeking plate of snails. He presses his finger into the warm yellow butter, sniffs and rubs it to nonexistence in the whorls of his own fingerprint, like salve. “You forget there’s a world with things like this in it.” His tone does not imply that he takes pleasure in remembrance.

“You must eat, though, won’t you?” She pours a glass of milk and sets it, foaming, at his place.

“The smell of it revolts me.” Pushing it away, he rolls his eyes to white. The lids briefly flutter like a girl’s, and this somehow moves her past her fears to an awareness of his state.

“Is there any whiskey?”

“There’s wine. Your Jerez. We hid it in hogsheads in the pond….”

“Bring that.”

She pours him half a glass, but Harlan puts a finger under the decanter and makes her fill it to the top.

“But, Harlan,” she says, sitting next to him and watching as he drains it in a single draft, “where did they take you? Jules said you were drowned in the evacuation….”

“I swam,” he says, refilling. “I tried to get to Sumter, but the tide was running hard against me. I was dazed and wounded. The water deepened and the current tugged and finally swept me off my feet. I grabbed a bit of wreckage and it carried me down Moffit’s Channel and, finally, out to sea. Next morning, I was picked up by the coalers on the Nahant. They were out to catch a breath of air and saw the circling gulls. I was transferred to Port Royal. They sent us to Fort Delaware. I was there eleven months. I was ill that winter,’63. I don’t remember spring. I couldn’t tell you if there was a spring that year….” He looks away, bemused, and she does notknow what to say.

“In August, they told us there was to be an exchange. We’d heard it many times before…. But this time seemed to be the truth. They sent six hundred of us south to Beaufort. I was expecting to be home any day. They put us on a boat, under a white flag, and told us we were going back to Charleston. The bastards. Instead, we went to Morris Island. There was a pen they’d built—like our cattle pens, but not so good as that. It’s on the north end, between Gregg and Wagner.” Now, another glass, the third. “They put us in the line of fire from Sumter. From our own guns. We were shields, you see, to protect their gunners in the batteries, and half the shells our own men fired came down on us. The Yankees, Addie, sat there safe in their revetments, behind the same palmetto logs we’d cut, the sand and earth we’d dug. They drank and laughed, taking bets on which of us would live or die that night, that afternoon.” And, finishing his third glass, he wipes his mouth and pours a fourth. “We had no shelter, not from weather, not from guns. The first few months, we dug holes in the sand like crabs and tried to hide. It made no difference. Especially from the seacoast howitzers. Did you know that was my gun? Yes…Oh, yes. In the Twenty-first.” Another heavy sip. A blink. A wince. “Then winter. The gales came in. They blew our shirts to rags. We had no coats, no wood for fire, no water, none clean at any rate. Men had to squat and do