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

their business where we walked and slept and ate. So many died they stacked them up like cordwood on the beach. At night, the fiddlers crept out and picked their bones. The guards accused us of eating our own dead. And some…” Harlan looks at Addie now, and then his eyes glaze, seeing something else. “You could tell those boys, Addie…. They kept the rose upon their cheeks….” And now the quarter smile on Harlan’s lips seems almost mocking. “After a while, when the shelling commenced, we took no notice. We sat in the open, playing cards, betting who would get it, both amongst ourselves and with the Yanks. And those who did, Addie? We considered them the lucky ones.” Three-quarters of the bottle is gone now. He seems dulled and weary suddenly; then he frowns. “You hear those goddamned birds? Where is my gun?”

“But I’ve told you, dear, the rice is in. It’s being threshed.”

“Why let them multiply to cause us future harm?”

He starts to rise, but stops when there are footsteps on the porch. They’re light and springing in a way she’s come to recognize, a way that means that Jarry’s come home happy, bearing news. “They’ve driven the first puncheons,” he announces, and he walks in, smiling, his hat off. Sometimes he throws it toward the upright of the chair, like the ringtoss at the fair, and she can see that he’s about to do this now. It’s in his hand to go when he sees Harlan sitting there, and he stops cold. His whole posture stiffens and becomes more formal, like a defendant in a court, an enlisted man before an officer. Addie realizes, with a pang, that she hasn’t seen him in this attitude for months and has grown accustomed to his ease and naturalness.

“They told me you were here,” says Harlan. “I, frankly, doubted it. I didn’t believe you’d have the gall to show your face.” He looks at Addie now. “You know he fought with them?”

“You must put your differences behind you now,” she says. “You both did what you believed was right. The war is over.”

“You’re naive, my dear, if you think that…. I’m curious, though, Jarry. After you betrayed us, after you betrayed your flesh and blood, what made you think we’d take you back?”

“I’m not here because of you.”

“Why are you here?”

Jarry doesn’t answer this. He can’t. Nor can he look at her. All he can do is hold Harlan’s stare, his hazel eyes direct, unflinching, like a pair of taps turned to their full flow. All this suffering and death, thinks Addie, all the boys with flushed cheeks running, yelling, up so many hills, hill after hill, four years of it, and it meant nothing. These two brothers hate each other exactly as before.

“What puncheons?” Harlan says.

“My dear,” says Addie, “we’ve come to an arrangement with the Negroes. You must understand…. I thought you were dead, and I’ve had to count on Jarry to advise me.”

“I see. And what advice have you received?”

“His plan is succeeding brilliantly,” she says. “Everyone else along the river is struggling, and we’ve had the best crop in ten years. Forty bushels to the—”

“You haven’t answered me,” he says. “What plan? Who’s driving puncheons? Where? For what?”

Her expression drops to one of sober candor now. “I’ve ceded them the island, Harlan.”

“You have what…Beard Island, do you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Ceded it to whom?”

“The slaves.”

“The freedmen,” Jarry says.

Harlan blinks at them in turn, incredulous. “Have you, then, lost your minds? On what authority have you done this?”

“The authority you gave me in your will.”

“And here I am, alive, so that is null and void, and there’s the end of it.”

“But, Harlan,” Addie says, “I gave my word. They’ve worked this whole season on that understanding. They’ve cut timber, started homes. The church is framed. The steeple’s on. The puncheons are in for the new wharf. They’ve done this in my name, upon my promise that the land and half the profits from the rice are theirs.”

“And you expect me to accede? These Negroes, half my wealth, have just been confiscated by the same government that allowed my father to acquire them legally, stolen from me at a single stroke of a tyrant’s pen, and now you want me to cede, what, a third of what’s left to me in land to them in exchange for…what? As a reward for their loyalty? As a courtesy? To celebrate the destruction of our state, our country, our hopes, our way of life? You’re a goddamned fool, Addie, a greater one than I took you for. You’ve lived your life in books, where noble heroes make foolhardy gestures such as this, ruining themselves and casting their children into penury. But in real life, no one acts this way or ever will. Starting from this moment, the niggers—the ‘freedmen’—can live in the cabins, which I own and formerly provided gratis, and they may pay me rent. They may work the rice for wages and buy the food I once put into their mouths for free. If they don’t like it, let them leave. After all, they’re free. Their savior, Lincoln, has emancipated them, and you see how his perfidies have been rewarded…. Booth, you know…They killed him, but thousands more will spring up in his place. You say the war is over, Addie, but you’ll soon have cause to know that’s not the case.”

“Come, man,” says Jarry now, “you can’t be serious. You’ve been defeated. At least show the character to admit you’ve lost.”

“What I admit,” Harlan rejoins, “is that my country is under occupation by a hostile foreign power.”

“But Davis himself signed the armistice,” Addie says.

“Jefferson Davis is a traitor and a coward. He betrayed our cause. Many of the notables of our government are in Mexico right now. They’ve made a treaty with the emperor Maximilian. One day, they’ll march north and free us from our occupation.”

“With what?” asks Jarry. “A dancing master and an orchestra? Will they waltz the government