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

now—was to separate him from the brightness in himself, to take him farther from the True Self he wished to find, farther from the place it was his destiny and right to go. It suddenly occurred to him that Claire wasn’t free. And why? Why wasn’t she?

“Is it because of me?”

Yes! Somehow it had to do with him and something in their history. Was it because, back when, she’d given up her career for his? Was it because his dream had sucked hers down into its undertow? Yes, this was it, and ever since, there’d been an understanding, never stated, that he had to make it up to her, and this was why he had to take the drugs, to protect Claire from his freedom. Or was it to protect her from her own? The bright skein of his logic began to fray, and Ransom wasn’t sure. All he knew was that he didn’t want to take drugs anymore. What he wanted was for Claire to be free, too, and as his partner and free equal to meet him in a place of strength and joy. Such a simple wish, but it was all he’d ever really wanted. Somehow in all these years he’d failed to make it happen, but maybe it was not too late. Maybe he could make it happen yet.

Deep into the country now, with the children singing in the back, Ransom had begun to think such deep and deeply hopeful thoughts as these.

“Right over here!” he said, herding them toward the periwinkle patch as soon as everyone had parked. “That’s where I found the pot. And the rotten sill”—he strode back to the house—“right there.”

“Is our house going to break?” asked Hope.

“No, sweetie, absolutely not,” said Claire. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

“That’s right,” said Ran. “If we left it, we might have a problem. But we aren’t going to leave it. Daddy’s going to fix the rot. See, Claire, Marcel, see how the yard slopes back this way? What I’m thinking is…”

“I need to pee,” said Hope, crossing one leg over the other. “Can I go in the grass?”

“Sure, sweetie, sure,” said Ran. “Wherever. A swale…”

“No, Hope,” said Claire. “Come on, let’s go in the house.”

Hope looked to Dad.

“Right, you go in the house with Mommy. You may want to throw on a pot of water for the rice,” he called after Claire as she took the kids and headed in. “Come on, Marcel, I’ll show you the ranch. You haven’t been here, have you?”

Jones hesitated slightly. “I helped Claire some when she moved in.”

“Did you? Damn good of you, man. I appreciate that. Come check out the view.”

They proceeded through the park and came out on the Bluffs. Ran pointed. “Those are the old rice dikes over there. They’re pretty overgrown, but it’s amazing they’ve held up this long. Can you imagine what it was like to build those things?”

“Not really,” said Marcel.

“Standing in cold black water to your knees,” said Ransom, helping out, “digging a brick-sized wad of clay out with your hoe, tossing it over your shoulder, clod by clod, until you had a wall six or eight feet high by six or eight feet thick around that whole twenty-acre field. There were over forty fields or ‘squares’ right here on Wando Passo, including a couple on Beard Island, just down there.” Ran pointed south. “Some guy from the College of Charleston, an anthropologist, found a church there a few years ago, all framed out in cypress, steeple and all, and never sided, never used. No one knows what it was doing there. And these fields stretch hundreds of miles—up and down the Pee Dee and the Waccamaw, the Black, the Santee, the Ashley and the Cooper. People compare the effort to the construction of the Pyramids, but if you ask me, it took more. In its heyday before the Civil War, this place produced a million pounds of rice a year. Tara, all that cotton money, tobacco up my way—that was all chump change compared to rice. This was once the richest place in North America.”

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

Ran couldn’t help but preen a bit. “Oh, not really, man. I just heard Clive give this speech so many times I could do it in my sleep. He wanted to make damn sure this redneck cracker from the other, lesser Carolina grasped the undeserved good fortune that had fallen in his lap. But, hey, I don’t know, Cell, maybe all this shit makes you feel strange. Can I say that without starting World War III?”

Marcel smiled. “You can say it.”

“So, does it?”

“A bit.”

“Yeah, me, too,” Ransom said. “It’s not like the clank of chains or old spirituals drifting on the wind, but there’s something on this land.” Ran stared over the water, his face contemplative. When he turned, he found Marcel studying him. “You feel it?”

“There’s something.”

They held each other’s eyes, having stepped by accident, through an unapparent door that neither probably could have found again, into a place where the backlog of their grievances did not exist, or simply ceased to matter, where they were just two men, old friends. Arriving, each remembered he had been here many times before.

Ransom was the first to turn away. “See that over there—that thing that looks like a wooden guillotine? That’s called a trunk gate. The blade is called a riser board. They raise and lower it to let river water on and off the fields.”

“They have them in Madagascar, too.”

Ran blinked at him. “No shit. When were you in Madagascar?”

“With Baba Olatunji.”

“Right,” said Ran. “Claire mentioned that. Nice gig?”

“We had fun. I learned a lot from him.”

“You know, man, I really ought to say, I’ve followed your career from afar with a certain awe.”

“Awe?” Jones asked skeptically.

“Well, awe may be overstating it,” Ran admitted. “Seriously, though, you’ve done good. You should be proud. I’m proud of you. Maybe even a little envious. Oh, what the fuck, I’m envious