Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

matte and rustling through the canopies of the old trees. When it passes, everything is still, and Addie now becomes aware of cicadas chirring and, farther off, the splash of water through the gate on the far shore.

“Vaya, Mamá,” Jarry whispers. “Vuele con ellos. You’re free.” He kisses her brow tenderly and covers her eyes with his whole hand, as though shielding them, and when he moves it, they are closed.

“How I wish I could spare you this,” says Addie now, with burning eyes.

“That’s what she said. She couldn’t, nor can you.”

“Do you know what I believe? Character is how we stand the pain of life, nothing more than that. I’ve never admired two people more than I do you and her.”

Jarry doesn’t answer, but Addie sees he’s moved by it, and she stands up and sweeps her skirts unhurriedly. Unhurriedly, she gazes up into the canopies of the old trees and to the sky beyond, which is blue and where astonishing white clouds move with a majestic slowness that has some aspect of eternity. There is, for once, no hurry, no hurry about anything.

“There’s such peace here. Do you feel it?”

His participating silence is all the answer Jarry gives. Allowing him his privacy, Addie gazes at the river sliding by. From the far shore, she can hear the brooding chitter of the flocks.

“She used to say they come from Guinea,” he says, after a time.

Addie looks at him. “Guinea?”

“Africa. Mama’s mother and before her…The old people there believed that when we die, we cross an ocean, so when they were brought here, when they were captured and put into the ships, they thought, some did, that they’d been brought to hell. They thought this was the land of the dead…. And when the birds came, Mother’s mother told her they came from Guinea, all that way across the ocean. She said they were God’s messengers, sent to us as friends, and that they came to eat the Pharaoh’s rice. She said they stand for what was before the plantation and will be after the plantation ends…. Because here, you see, we are in hell. We are in torment and subjugation, but the birds come to remind us of our true home, across the ocean, tan lejos…so far away….”

“That’s why you put the feather in my book,” she says to him, with shining eyes.

“That’s why I put the feather in your book, because you came with the birds, and like them, you reminded me that past hell, past the end of days, there is a world of life, and someday I will be delivered unto it. We both will be. For I now see it is the same for you.”

“Yes,” she says, “it is the same for me. Thank you for seeing that.”

“That’s what her story meant. She told it to me for the same reason her mother told her, to give me something to believe in and to hope for. And that’s why I put the feather in your book, to say, take heart, though you suffer, there is still beauty and beauty is something…to say, take heart, there is still life, and life is something. And someday you will return to your true home.”

Jarry looks at her. His eyes are still questioning, but they’ve opened past the pain and grief. They’re like windows into something deep, and in that deep place, there’s a relaxed, sad strength, heavy with the weight of life, bemused by it, but wondering, too—not in flight from it, not rejecting, not rebelling, not afraid.

“There’s something I must tell you, Jarry.” She kneels beside him on the ground, and they are face-to-face. “You’re free.”

He merely blinks. “With you, you mean….”

“No,” she says. “I mean your father freed you in his will. He gave it to me, Jarry. Harlan took it and destroyed it. He swore me to silence, and I…It was against my conscience, but I allowed him to prevail.”

He holds her stare for a long beat. Addie sees he’s unprepared for this, but his openness to her remains. And then he starts to weigh. A reckoning sets in; the opening begins to narrow. His eyes glaze, and Jarry finally looks away. “I expected something of the sort,” he says eventually, in a level tone that makes her start to panic. “Mother said you were involved. She said she’d seen it in your face. I didn’t believe her.”

“Please forgive me—can’t you?”

He doesn’t answer, doesn’t look at her, and at his silence, his refusal to meet her gaze, Addie feels opened up and gutted, the way a hunter guts a doe.

“Jarry, please, say something.” She reaches toward him. “Don’t leave me comfortless.”

“As you left me?” he says, gazing down at her white hand on his black arm. “As you left her?”

Addie receives this like a slap. Stunned by it, she can’t think what to say. And as she watches, speechless, Jarry picks Paloma’s body up and starts out of the plot.

She runs after him and stops him by the gate. “I should have spoken, Jarry. If I didn’t, it was from fear and weakness. It was because I was confused. I am at fault, and I apologize with all my heart.”

Jarry simply looks at her for a long beat, and then, carrying his mother, he turns and walks away.

FORTY

Ransom knelt with them on Meeting Street before the big black door. Sweeping Hope’s hair from one blue eye, he straightened Charlie’s collar, then licked his fingers and took a swipe at the ice cream on his son’s cheek. The smell—saliva mixed with chocolate—conjured up a ghostly image of some woman doing this to him. Was it his mom? Another memory to add to the impoverished album Ran possessed, which consisted, really, of just one page, just one clear shot: her sliding down the kitchen wall with blood streaming from her nose, as Mel stood astraddle, drunk and bellowing, “It ain’t never enough, is it, bitch? No matter what I