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

stob as clump after leafy clump went down, hemorrhaging a green fragrance and filling his cuffs with vegetal dicings. Pretty soon, his sweat-drenched T was modeled to his back, suggesting uncooked chicken breast.

Pausing to catch his breath, he stared toward the graveyard, which was laid out beneath an enormous cypress tree, whose branches bristled against a threatening blue-purple sky. Beyond the river, threads of soundless lightning flashed in the direction of Columbia.

As Ransom waded in again, the stob found him, snagging the line so hard it almost wrenched the trimmer from his hand.

Kneeling, Ransom took a closer, daylight look, as the first raindrops fell like tarnished pennies, splatting overlapping circles in the hot red dust.

What he’d uncovered was actually a foot, an iron foot. Feline in appearance, a little larger than a thumb, it suggested some big jungle cat, a jaguar or a leopard. Its crudely fashioned pads still showed the blacksmith’s hammer marks, and there were tiny claws that age or use had almost worn away. A rusty link of hand-forged chain protruded from the clay beside it.

“What the hell have you done now.”

He reached toward it, then, thinking better, fetched a spade and gloves out of the shed. In short order, as the rain fell harder, two more feet emerged, then the domed bottom of an overturned black pot—one might have said a cauldron. Buried in the anthill upside down, it was wrapped with chain, a single length crimped back on itself in a continuous loop. When Ransom yanked, the links crumbled like cigarette ash, smearing his gloves with orange chalk. Reaching down, he heaved till, finally, with a sumping whoomp, it came.

Inside were many things—some identifiable, most not—suspended in a hardened composite of mud and clay. Like flotsam from an ancient shipwreck, bits and corners peeked out from the frozen waves of earth—a stone, a candle stub, a coin, a nail, a shell. There was a small glass vial half full of fluid. Ran lifted it and something clinked inside. He held it to the light but couldn’t see through the blue glass.

Ran was hesitant to touch the pot with his bare hand, but his little voice said, Oh, go on…. You just scared yourself last night. It can’t do any harm. And when he shucked his glove, he did feel something coming through the iron—not heat, but some subtler energy, difficult to name. It sent a tingle to his earlobes, another to his loins.

At that moment, a slanting sheet of sunlight broke out of the rain, setting the drops individually on fire like prisms on a chandelier. Ransom closed his eyes, and just like that, the song was back and had the heavy chink of gold doubloons again and all their deep-sea gleam.

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….

Some Geiger counter was going off inside him, giving warning clicks, but Ransom found it hard to tear his hand away. Just before he forced himself, something glanced along his back, as though someone had passed a candle not quite close enough to burn. It was the pressure of a pair of watching eyes, and when Ransom turned around, he saw someone standing at an upstairs window of the house.

“Claire?” The word died on his lips, and even as he spoke, Ran knew that it was not his wife. All he could make out was a silhouette, but Ran was almost sure the figure was a man.

EIGHT

Madam, I insist! You must partake. This receipt is of a sacred provenance, brought down from Sinai with the tablets of the law. It’s Colonel Lay’s own punch.”

“Colonel Lay?” says Addie as she takes the cup. Harlan, it would seem, owing to the late arrival of the Nina, is in a state of more advanced conviviality than she has seen him in before in Charleston. And she notes, too, that the crowd pressing in on them beneath the tent is mostly male and military—members of his regiment, the Twenty-first Artillery, some boys barely half his age, who seem to regard him as a roué uncle and are eager to be led astray. The women in attendance have withdrawn to the piazza, where they can be seen fanning themselves and watching the carousings from within the cinched circles of their bonnets, with narrowed eyes.

The event is teetering on a precipice, in danger of disintegrating, momently, into a whorehouse free-for-all, a fact underscored by the Purdey’s unsettling, repeated roar from the landing below, and by the banquet table, which is wonderful, but like no Lowcountry banquet table seen before. Paloma and Clarisse, her daughter—who have yet to show themselves, though Addie looks continually, eager to ascertain what sort of creatures they may be—have thrown a wedding al estilo cubano. Instead of a roast beef or leg of lamb, the central offering is a pig—not a suckling, but a hundred-and-fifty-pounder—presented splayed out like a bearskin rug with head and trotters still attached, the latter decorated with pleated paper frills, like the perfumed cuffs of an Elizabethan dandy. The creature rests on a grassy bed, one might almost say a field of cilantro, and smells quite pungently—yet appetizingly—of that herb, as well as of sour orange juice and garlic. In lieu of an apple, it has a mango in the cleft of its split chin, and is surrounded by piles of other tropic fruit—mameys, guanabanas, and papayas, some imported, others grown on the estate, transplanted here from Cuba long ago by Percival, who is—or was, before his health declined—an avid horticulturalist. Furthering the Cuban theme, a pair of girls in stiff new frocks wend through the crowd, dispensing curtseys together with refrescos—limonadas and panales—from a tray, as well as savory little pastries known as empanadas filled with crab or cheese and guava.

But the greatest wonder is the cake, which represents a large imperial building in the colonial