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

the chair. But as she looks into his face, at Jarry’s honest pain, the falsity of her position looms.

“They brought me home behind the mules,” he continues, “trotting with a rope around my neck. In the infirmary, I broke a water glass and cut my wrists”—he shows her now the scars he hid before—“but Mother found me and stanched the bleeding. The second time, I strung a rope from the library chandelier and stepped off the partners desk. I wanted Father to be the one to find me. I wanted to fix that image in his mind. That time, he cut me down himself. When I came to, I found him pacing. That was when he finally looked at me. ‘Tell me why you want to do this to your mother,’ he said. ‘Tell me why you want to do this to yourself.’

“‘Because a man like you can take the life of one like Thomas and then sit down to supper as though nothing happened and God allows it,’ I said.

“‘I didn’t authorize those men to do what they did, Jarry,’ Father said. ‘They said they gave him every chance to surrender, but he turned and swam.’

“‘He turned and swam because he was a man.’ I shouted it. ‘A man. That’s what they killed him for. His blood is on your hands. And I’ll never forgive you for it. Never.’ Those bastards,” Jarry says, no longer repeating what he told his father now, but speaking straight to her. “They should have fallen to their knees and worshipped him for what he did, for showing them such courage and humanity. Instead they shot h—” He bites down hard on what he feels. “Instead, they shot him in the head and watched him sink.”

“So Percival saw who you were.”

Jarry frowns and looks away. “I don’t know what he saw.”

“No, he could not have failed to see. I know, because I see the same thing now myself.”

He holds her stare and doesn’t contradict. “What is it?” he asks suddenly. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t…know,” she answers, panting. Her eyes are round and large, too large for her face; she’s trembling, too—hands, shoulders, her whole body now.

THIRTY-TWO

Through an open window, Ran could hear the buzzer’s persecuting whine, mosquitolike, upstairs in Tildy’s old white house. As he cast a backward glance toward Alberta and the kids, he thought, despairingly, she might be out. But then the curtain moved, and soon he heard the tread of crepe-soled feet. The door opened and Della—the maid Claire called her “dah”—stared out.

“Mister Ransom,” she said, with no suggestion of surprise, no affect of any kind…. Mustuh Ransom, in that drawling voice he’d always loved, slow, lugubrious, yet droll.

“Hello, Della,” he said, smiling despite everything. “Aunt Tildy home?”

“Miss Tildy’s upstairs in the parlor.” The pollah, Della said, incidentally correcting him and giving him a subtle warning. “Aunt” had never been conceded to the upstart North Carolina boy who’d married Miss Claire. Ransom failed to take the hint.

“Step this way.”

Opening the big black brass-knobbed door, Della led him down the piazza to the entry in the middle of the ground-floor porch. Inside, in sepia light, they passed beneath the old gas chandelier in the front hall—a Philadelphia piece of bronze and ormolu, as convoluted and baroque, Ran had always thought, as the pipe organ in Nemo’s antechamber. He especially loved the globes of frosted glass etched with sheaves of rice, betokening what, once upon a time, had paid for it. Past Piranesi engravings of Italian scenes—brought back by dead ancestors from grand tours long forgotten—they proceeded up the stairs to the West Parlor, also called the Music Room, which contained the pianoforte on which Adelaide Huger once entertained her future husband, accompanying herself, as she sang Thomas More’s rendition of “She Walks in Beauty Like the Night,” the sheet music of which lay, yellowed but otherwise undisturbed, in the compartment of the bench.

Outfitted in the ceremonial dress and coif of a prior era, Miss Matilda sat between this instrument and an eighteenth-century harp, constructed in London by Sebastian Erard, a wizened Euterpe, her palsied hands resting on a silver-headed cane.

“Long time, no see, Aunt T,” said Ran as Della softly closed the pocket doors and vanished. “Good to see you.”

Tildy appraised him with a rheumy eye as cold and dark as the bull’s-eye mirror in the girandole above the mantelpiece. “I wish I could reciprocate yo’ sentiment.”

Ran, in light of history, was not expecting a parade; nonetheless, this greeting stung. “Okay, no light banter. I get it. Ground rules established.” He allowed himself to smile.

Tildy, pointedly, did not. “No news in years has heartened me mo’ than hearing Claire had finally left you and come home to Clive’s,” she said, in her gloomy, sonorous old drawl, “where she belongs; nor any disheartened me as much as hearing you’d returned to suck that poor child’s lifeblood once again. When do you intend to let her go? Not, I suppose, till you’ve extracted the last dram and left her nothing but a husk.”

“Come on, Aunt Tildy, that’s a little harsh, don’t you think?” he said, preserving his smile with effort—refusing, rather, to give her the satisfaction of defeating it. But it was dire, and as Ran direly smiled, he thought, You hateful, shriveled-up old witch, what do you know about marriage—mine, ours, anyone’s?

“And I am not yo’ aunt,” Tildy added, giving the knife an extra twist.

Gravity now prevailed in Ransom’s face. Crossing, uninvited, to the window, he pulled back the curtain and looked.

Wearing a sweetgrass helmet, Charlie was in animated conversation with Alberta, who stood, arms akimbo, clearly charmed. Hope, meanwhile, held apart, gazing up at the window, puzzling out the terms. They were both okay. They were who they were. The problem was the situation he had placed them in. The problem, Ransom realized, was him.

A minstrel… The phrase popped suddenly into his head. “We’ve had lawyers, planters, governors, diplomats,” Clive had said to Ran at