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

and increase suspicions he’d thereby hoped to quell. On balance, it seemed best to keep moving, keep moving, like Robert Johnson’s ghost was singing in the Odyssey right now. There was a story here, as Thomason had pointed out, and even if it happened a long time ago, before he was even born, Ran had begun to wonder and to worry—prompted by that little voice that, as time went on, seemed less and less familiar—that maybe that old story had something to do with him after all, something to do with all of them. To make that determination, first he had to find out what the story was. His gaze homed in on the second-story window of what Ran felt fairly confident was the Music Room, and he prayed Aunt Tildy would be home.

“This here’s bulrush, and this one’s sweetgrass,” Alberta said to Hope, running a supple strand between her fingers to arm’s length. “Smell that, ain’t it nice? My mama used to smell of that, and that was just about her color, too. Me, I’m like this dark here in the coil. That’s pine straw, and this one…who you reckon this one is?” Alberta laid a pale frond, ribbon-width, against Hope’s arm and smiled.

“Me?”

“Um-hm. That’s palmetto, sugar. The rush and grass what make it strong, but the palmetto holds it all together. That’s the thread you use to sew the coil. And this here, see? This is your needle. Ain’t nothing but a old spoon you cut the bowl off and file flat. Now lookahere. You tuck it in and pull it through, and then you tuck it back and pull it out, in and out, and back and through…. See how I do? You try it now.”

Alberta gave the spoon to Hope, and Ransom watched his daughter weaving brown with white and white with brown and brown with white again. As the old woman turned the basket clockwise in her lap by slow degrees, the spiral mesmerized him, and the different-colored strands rayed out around the central disk no longer seemed like spokes so much as sunbeams, checkered sunbeams radiating from a checkered sun, and it was not completed yet…It was being woven still, by this old woman and this girl, hands black and white, but it was far along and had to be completed at all costs.

Something had seized hold of Ran. He felt the small hairs stand along his back and remembered now what he always forgot, the deeper reason why he strayed from his chemical regime. Sex was the least part of it; the real reason was because there always came a point where what he had no longer felt like a disease. There came a point when he contacted something in himself he trusted more than medicines or doctors, more, even, than he trusted Claire, his wife. Standing on the west side of Meeting Street in Charleston, before the courthouse, opposite the church, Ran had reached that point again, and he smelled the sea air now and caught the clop of hooves receding on the cobblestones. The shhhh of traffic sounded like breath exhaled, and he noticed the light now, that special September light you find only in Charleston, on late afternoons, from four p.m. and on. Ran, at least, had seen it nowhere else, still broad day away up there, so blue and high, rinsed clean, where seagulls wheeled, while down here, closer to the ground, shadows had begun to fall.

Hard to tell what’s in a person’s heart by looking in their face, Mr. Hill. Awful hard. Sergeant Thomason’s objection surfaced, and Ransom, looking at Alberta, gave it due consideration before putting it aside. That lesson was from the basic course; Ransom, now, had moved on to advanced.

“Alberta?”

She looked up and frowned, as though remembering him unwillingly.

“I’ve got to speak to someone down the street. You see that house?” He pointed, and she turned her head.

“That’s Miss Tildy DeLay’s,” she said. “What you want with her? You ain’t going to knock her in the haid and take her jew’ry, are you?”

“She’s my aunt,” said Ran.

“Your aunt?” Alberta studied him. “Git on out from here, boy! You ain’t got the bones to come from that!”

Ransom frowned. “You’re a discerning woman, Alberta—we’ve established that. I need your help. Can you watch the children while I go?”

“Watch your children…”

“For ten minutes. Fifteen, tops.”

“What’s wrong with you?” she said indignantly. “You don’t know me, boy. I could be the devil in blue suede shoes.”

Ran stared deep into Alberta’s deep experienced old eyes and shook his head. “No, uh-uh, I don’t think so. No one who weaves lines that straight can have a crooked heart. You know I’m right.”

“You wrong is what I think. You most seriously wrong.”

“It’s important, Alberta.”

“Take ’em with you then.”

Ransom shook his head. “I can’t. If I was on fire, Tildy wouldn’t piss on me to put it out, but this trouble I’m in, Alberta? Tildy’s the only hope of help I’ve got. I can’t handle the children and her both. I’ll pay you a hundred dollars.”

“A hundred dollars?”

“Make it two,” he said. “A hundred now and another hundred when I come back out.”

“Lord have mercy.” Alberta clucked her tongue and looked away. “I hope you ain’t the devil come to tempt me.”

“I hope so, too,” said Ran. “I’m pretty sure I’m not.”

“Pretty sure ain’t all that comforting.”

“That’s why I’m leaving them with you. Is it a deal or not?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Fifteen, tops.” He held out the bill, and she hesitated, then snatched it.

“Fifteen means fifteen,” she said. “It don’t mean fifteen and a half.”

“Thank you, Alberta. Thank you very much. You see that window? I’ll be standing there the whole time looking down. If you need me, just wave and I’ll come running. And if they disappear, Alberta, if my children disappear even for a second and a half…” He turned the basket and nodded to the tag. “Just remember, I know where you live.”

“Don’t start threatening,” she said. “I ain’t going to take