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

and get the cargo up the steep embankment to the train. There are two hundred tierces of rice. Each weighs six hundred pounds. This is sixty tons of rice, more than a tenth of Wando Passo’s annual production. In Charleston—where every public space, from Washington Race Course to White Point Garden, is filled with tents—Jarry sells the lighter load for three cents a pound, $3,600. Despite this sum, despite Blanche Huger’s fervent, and at times hysterical, exertions, Jarry succeeds in procuring only fifty grains of quinine. There is no more to be had at any price.

There are four knots in the string the morning he returns. He has ridden all night, and his eyes are red and glassy. His pants are soaked with his horse’s sweat, his boots flecked with lather.

“It’s half of what I hoped,” Sims says, “but more than what we had.”

He prescribes three grains the first day, four the second, and so on, up to six on the fourth day. On the fifth and sixth, he gives Addie eight grains at twelve-hour intervals. By the afternoon of the seventh day, she’s had no recurrence in forty-eight hours. She’s sitting up in bed and showing evidence of life. Jarry brings her gifts from the garden—fragole Alpine, and sugar snaps, and salsify, and the season’s first small cimbelines, which is what Peter calls his yellow crook-necked squash.

“These taste like summer,” she tells Jarry, breaking a snap with a crisp report and offering him the second half. “I never knew food could taste like this.”

Jarry smiles at her elation.

“So my fears were groundless after all. I wronged Clarisse in thinking ill of her.”

He doesn’t contradict, but something narrows in his eyes.

“Jarry, thank you.” She takes his hand from his lap and presses it. Their access to each other—exciting, fearful, without apparent cause—seems unimpaired. Addie can almost forget her guilty secret, gazing into his eyes, which reflect her in a way no eyes ever have. It’s as if she’s suddenly the person she was always meant to be, who has eluded every effort on her part, but now, with none at all, in Jarry’s beholding, she has suddenly become.

“Shall I read to you?” he asks.

“Unless you purpose Wordsworth…”

“No, I doubt you’re yet strong enough for that.”

She allows her eyes to widen at the slyness in his tone. “You have a spark of evil in you, don’t you, Jarry? Impertinent, purest evil. I never noticed that till now.”

He colors, smiles, and makes no effort to refute her charge.

“You know what I should like far better, though? A walk,” she says. “No, no, don’t deny me. Please. I’ve been cooped up here so long. A breath of fresh air and a few stray beams of sunlight on my face—that would do me more good than all the poetry on earth. May we? Just to the Bluffs and back?”

“Are you sure it’s not too soon?”

“If I fall over, you may say, ‘I told you so.’ You may even bring your Wordsworth. I’ll steel myself to suffer through a verse.”

“It may prove better medicine than you expect.”

“Its medicinal properties are not in doubt.”

So off they go, this fine June morning, down the white sand road. As they pass the barn, the sound of female laughter draws them.

Inside, a group of long-legged teenage girls, with shimmies showing and skirts hiked halfway up their thighs, are treading barefoot in a soup of dark gray mud. An older man named Jonadab sloshes this from a piggin he fills at a barrel of river water mixed with clay. Conscious of his attention—and that of several older male admirers standing by—the girls dance a kind of sensual minuet, half slip and slide, laughing and shouting protests when a bombardier, hidden in the loft, releases a drift of well-aimed seed that lodges in their headcloths and their hair, before they brush it off and tramp it down.

“What on earth?” asks Addie.

“They’re claying the seed for tomorrow’s planting,” Jarry tells her. “Have you never seen it done?”

“You can’t pretend it’s any kind of work?”

Though Addie laughs to show how much she cares, one girl takes umbrage at the charge. “Yes, ma’am, it is. If it ain’t clayed, the seed’ll float up when you put water on de fiel’, and then the buds duh et it up.”

“The birds?”

“Yes’m, de buds, like I said.”

“Well, you’ve taught me something I didn’t know.”

“Iss awright, miss,” she says, extending charity.

“They almost,” she says to Jarry as they continue, “make me remember what it was to be that young and that untroubled. You’d never think that there are hostile armies in the field.”

“Children will still play, though there be war.”

“Is that a proverb?”

“I think you take some pleasure in twitting me.”

“It’s not my most attractive quality, I’m sure,” she answers with a high color in her cheeks. “Yet it does me far more good than Wordsworth ever could. You wouldn’t deny me it, surely?”

And he is flustered now.

“Have I embarrassed you? I have! Oh, Jarry, I didn’t mean…”

“You didn’t.”

She studies him, her hand upon her breast, and they are at the river now.

“Look how beautiful it is!” Giving him an intentional reprieve from her attention, she turns away and finds charm in the blue and yellow jessamine in riot on the banks. There’s an egret, poised on one leg, fishing in the shallows on the opposite shore, and a row of turtles—nine of them, lined up shell to shell upon a log—black against the water’s dazzle. “Why does the sky seem so much bigger here?”

Recovered now, Jarry shakes his head.

“What does it mean, though, Jarry?” she says, thinking of a question that has several times occurred to her. “Wando Passo? Is it Spanish?”

“No.”

“Indian?”

“There was a tribe, the Wando, hereabouts. The creek there”—now he points—“cuts between the Pee Dee and the Waccamaw, and they may have used it to reach the English trading post that once sat on these bluffs. Father thought it might have been a kind of pidgin that arose between two peoples who didn’t share a