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

“No, Harlan,” Jarry answers, “it’s you who hate me. That’s what this is about, not the property, which may suffer from my absence, but will still be yours after the war and can always be made right when you return.”

“I don’t hate you,” Harlan says. “What makes you think I do? Why would I?”

“Because I have the presumption, as a Negro, to consider myself a human being and a man, like you, and because Father, in his heart, chose me. Not that I was better, Harlan. But there has always been a sympathy between us, an effect of temperament that you’ve resented for as long as I recall. And now you’re asking him to make up to you for the love that you did not receive, which you feel was taken from your rightful share by me, and what you’re requiring him to do to make this right to you is to betray me, to betray his honor and to break his word. And I believe the man I know is too wise and decent to let you win.”

“That’s a lie,” says Harlan. “All of it is hateful, impertinent lies. This place made a million pounds of rice last year. The nation needs that rice. The army must be fed. Against that and the welfare of this family, what have you to counterpose? Nothing but your selfish wish. In the end, we no more need your leave to keep you than I need Runcipole’s permission to climb upon his back and ride or the permission of the dirt to make my crop. Father may consider you a son, Jarry, but make no mistake, that’s what you are to me, the equivalent of so much pasture, so much paddy in a square of rice. Obey me, and you’ll have your freedom when the war is done. Cross me, and I’ll shove a hoe into your hands and put you on the next flat to the fields and work you like a dray until the day you die.”

Jarry holds Harlan’s stare, then turns to Percival. “Does he speak for you?”

The weight of it is in the old man’s face, and all the room attends. Clearly torn, he hesitates, and Addie sees fatigue and age where they have not been fully evident before. “I’m sensible of my promise, Jarry,” he says, looking sunken, grayed, and miserable, “but you must know Harlan can contest the will, and in the courts as they are now, you’d have no chance, my boy, no chance at all. And there’s also truth in what he says. The roads are full of armed men now. Perhaps it would be safer for you to bide your time at Wando Passo till hostilities conclude, and it would be a comfort to your mother, too. Would you consider staying on if you were freed and paid a wage?”

“That’s not what we agreed.”

“You see?” shouts Harlan now. “You see, Father?” His look solicits Addie, too. “He doesn’t want to reach accommodation with us.”

“What I see,” says Percival, “is that you’re angry at me, both of you, yet you turn it on each other. Let me take it. Give me what is mine. Can’t there be peace and common cause between you, at least until the war is done?”

“There can be peace when he accepts his duty to obey,” says Harlan.

“Tell me what to do, Jarry,” says Percival, with a despairing face. “If I free you, he’ll have the will annulled and punish you; if I don’t, you’ll feel betrayed.”

Jarry makes no answer to his father. The expression on his face is one Addie will remember—the failure of surprise, and, more than that, the fatigue, the immense fatigue of an old wound or grievance, resurrected by this interchange, but older in its provenance, which is the thing that makes his eyes both like and, finally, so different from Percival’s. He puts her Byron on the partners desk and walks out without another word.

Harlan turns to them. “You see? This is what they are.” There is a smirking, mean triumphalism in his face.

“What they are?” says Percival, erupting. “I will tell you who he is. When Jarry was fifteen, he ran away and was brought in by the dogs. Twice, he tried to kill himself. The second time, I cut him from the rope with my own hands and sat him in this chair. I told him, ‘If you’ll work and reconcile yourself to your position, I’ll free you when I die.’ So while you played and rode and wasted what he made, Jarry rose before first light and came home in the dark each night on the last flat with the last crew. If you have dreams for the future, dreams for your wife and children, Jarry built them. What dream does he have? What has he to show for twenty-seven years of work—a cast-off suit of clothes? A better cut of meat? His one dream was freedom, which he’s long since earned. Now you ask me to go before my maker with a broken promise on my head….”

“If he’s paid his debt, then free him now.”

Percival frowns, clearly surprised.

“Why wait?” says Harlan, pressing his advantage. “This is what I resent, Father. Knowing Jarry’s value to yourself, you never freed him, just as you never did Paloma. Now you ask of me—of us”—he rests his heavy hand on Addie’s shoulder—“a sacrifice you found too onerous.”

In Percival’s expression, there is brief affront, but it is swiftly followed by a look of acknowledgment. With a tired sigh, he collapses on himself. “So,” he says in a deflated voice. “So. In this at least, I fear you’re right.” The old man looks at Addie now. “I wanted amity between them. I thought, if it could start in this one house…It’s my fault it has come to this.”

“If you wish to rectify it, Father,” says Harlan, waxing as the old man wanes, “you can do so with a single word. Give me the will. We’ll burn