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

“Here’s her number.” Ran handed her the card he’d lifted from Claire’s Rolodex, together with his cell phone. “Call me if you need me, and listen, Alberta, if anything goes wrong…and I mean seriously wrong, I mean an emergency…See this? You hit this key—number 2—and hold it down, and it’ll dial their mother. Her name is Claire. Don’t call her unless you really have to, Alberta, hear me? But if you have to, don’t even blink. These children are everyth—” Suddenly Ransom had to suck his breath and look away.

“Well, don’t start bawling in the middle of the street,” she said. “I watched plenty of children in my time and never lost one yet. I reckon I can watch two more for fifteen minutes.”

“Okay, Hope,” Ran said to his daughter, who’d been attending to this negotiation with an expression of profound misgiving. “Charlie, bring it in. Listen, guys, Alberta’s going to look after you for a few minutes while I run down the block. I won’t be long, okay? You mind your manners, do what she says, and don’t go near the street.”

“Daddy,” Hope said, lowering her voice, “I don’t think Mommy—”

“Mommy’s not here,” he cut her off. “I have to make this call. Alberta’s all right. She’ll take good care of you.”

Hope looked unconvinced, and Charlie, picking up the vibe, began to cry. Ran looked back and forth between them. “Look, guys,” he said, deciding to come clean, “I won’t lie to you. Something is a little wrong, but I’m on top of it. Daddy’s going to get it fixed, but I need your help for ten or fifteen minutes. Can you give me that?”

Charlie, snuffling up his tears, merely nodded, prepared to charge whatever hill. “I want ice keem, Doddy.”

“When I get back, I’ll get you some.”

“Promise?”

Ransom crossed his heart.

Hope, however, didn’t let him off the hook. The look she gave Ransom seared him. It was the look of someone who’s defended you against all comers, who’s called day night for you, and black, white, in the moment she first realizes your detractors were all right.

“I have to do this, Pete,” he said. And Ransom turned his back.

THIRTY-ONE

So Addie works.

Her first morning alone at Wando Passo, she hurries downstairs, thinking to throw herself into her project, only to find fifteen people waiting on the porch.

“Good morning. Is there something…”

“We yeah fuh git de day tas, miss.” The gardener, Peter, looks at her expectantly, holding his doffed cap.

Her brow creases like a press, attempting to extract essential oil from this. “Forget” is the one word she thinks she gets. “Perhaps you should speak to Jarry….”

“’E wif de bud mindas cross de ribbah, mistis.” Peter points toward the fields on the far side of the Pee Dee. “Shum, enty?”

“I’m sorry…”

“Dey, mistis. Yeddy ’im?” He points to his ear. “Dey dey!” He thrusts his hand in frustrated emphasis.

Fortunately, at this moment Paloma appears from the trees with two young girls carrying the shallow sweetgrass baskets known as fanners. Normally used to winnow rice, these are presently filled with a silvery-white eider Addie can’t identify.

“Day tasks” turns out to be the operative phrase, and Addie listens carefully, understanding little, as the old woman sets them all about their work. There is Minda, the head cook, and the gardener, Peter, and Peter’s boy, and the butler, William, and Ancrum, the coachman, and Tenah and Annie, the up-and downstairs maids, and the laundress, Hattie, and two seamstresses, and Jas, the second dining room man, and the scullion, Lem, and Peck and John and Tilly, whose duties Addie fails to grasp, and several others whose names escape on this first pass. Addie can’t comprehend who they all are, or why so many servants are required. And spoken Gullah is a far cry from the version she’s heard Harlan and other Georgetown planters imitate at parties, charming laughing audiences, which frequently included her, with anecdotes about old Quash—frustrated in love and offering the “retort cuddius” to some rival for his sharp-tongued paramour’s affections—at St. Cecelia’s Balls, between the German and the waltz.

In an effort to make up for the candles they’ve lost—Wando Passo uses thirty dozen every month—Paloma sets the girls to spinning wicks from milkweed down collected in the swamp, and then she turns to Addie with a cool appraisal that calls to mind the word she spoke in private—“regla”—which forevermore will form part of Addie’s core understanding of the world.

Intimidated by the older woman, Addie keeps their exchange polite, but to a minimum. Feeling isolated and superfluous in her new home, the new mistress throws herself into her stocking project, but the maxim from her MmeTogno days creeps back.

“A promise broken, hell hath opened…. A promise kept, and hell hath wept….”

Addie knits in rhythm to the words, a maddening refrain she can’t purge from her thoughts. To make it stop, she counts. There are two hundred stitches to the row. Somewhere shy of two thousand, in the one thousand nine hundred nineties, Addie loses count and must begin again. By lunch on the first day, she—who’s knitted no few infant caps for pregnant Charleston friends—has managed fifty rows; by suppertime, a hundred. Twenty thousand stitches in a single day to make a piece of fabric not quite large enough to cover half her hand. That night, with blurred vision, she reads Mrs. Hamilton on education, wanting to fill her mind with self-improving thoughts, turning the pages with her cramped right hand. On the second day, she picks up her pace and manages a hundred and fifty rows. The first stocking, when it’s done, contains nine hundred rows and has taken seven days of constant work. Like a traveler on a mountain she’s thought to climb with ease, Addie feels the shadow of the peak fall over her and, looking up, begins to grasp how high it truly is. Seven hundred ninety-nine to go. On day thirteen, in mingled triumph