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

the men are bringing in the firewood now, mending fences, mauling roads; the women, picking apples, putting up the pork. For two weeks, they slaughter, and Addie works beside them, holding a glistening sleeve of gut between two fists, shaking hot salt water back and forth, then letting it spill into the great smoking hole, carrying away the smell of shit from what will now be casings for the Christmas sausages. She spends five days sunk to her armpits in corning brine, until the flesh shreds off her palms in sheets. At night she reads, sometimes till one or two. Irving’s “Sketchbooks,” Gilpin, Cowper, “Lalla Rookh,” and Scott, “The Lady of the Lake” and “Marmion,” “The Story of Rimini” by Leigh Hunt. She’s drawn, especially, to tales of lovers who come to tragic ends. Her Byron, though, sits on the table, unopened, with the green feather at the place; beside it, Percival’s old Wordsworth and “Evangeline”—she never touches these, nor lets them far outside her reach.

It’s this winter, soon after her return, that the fright begins. One night, alone in the house, brushing out her hair after Tenah and the others have retired, Addie glances up and sees a figure in the mirror—fleetingly there, half glimpsed, then gone. A hand over her pounding heart, she sits there as the cold wind blows outside, tossing the old trees against the moon, and she remembers what hasn’t troubled her in all these years.

When she was a little girl in bed upstairs at Blanche’s house, sometimes she closed her eyes at night and saw her mother’s face—something she’d, no doubt, confabulated from a photograph—but not as she had been in life. The woman Addie saw wore a black wreath of waterweed and came flying like an angel through a current undersea, her torn, drenched clothes rippling and streaming out behind. In the mirror, Addie sometimes glimpsed her pale, drowned face, before her eyes registered what was really there: herself. For the whole of one dark year—was she seven? Six?—she avoided mirrors, would not on any dare gaze down into a puddle in the street. She always fancied it was to tell her why she’d walked into the sea that day that her mother came, and at the bottom of it all, Addie was terrified to receive this confidence. For once you knew…what then? What, then, would there be to prevent you—you, too…? Was this it?

And then, when she was eight, as suddenly as it arrived, the vision went away. And from that day to this, not until tonight, has Addie given it a thought. So why this winter, with such good news from Virginia, with Charleston all so gay, why after Jarry leaves, does Addie see the figure in the mirror once again? Why, now as then, does she look up each time a board creaks in the hall? Why does she wait, with bated breath, for silence to redescend?

And one night—not this first one, but the second or the third—the creak is followed by another. There are footsteps.

“Tenah?” she calls, and her heart is like to burst. “Who’s there?”

No one answers, but Addie, sitting there in bed, fancies she can feel an awareness, not her own, on the other side, an awareness like that of the hound dog, Sultan, the moment when he looks up from his bone, sensing an intruder, not yet seen.

There is something in the house with her—the thought is very clear…. Clear, too, the intuition that it’s not her mother. The presence is a man.

FORTY-FOUR

Ran was far too wired to sleep. After showering, he gave consideration to a shave.

“What, though, would be the point?” Apparently agreeing, his reflection shrugged, and so he kept the growth and snooped discreetly, running his finger down the spines on Shanté’s shelf. Folklore from Adams County by Harry Middleton Hyatt; Pow-Wows, or The Long-Lost Friend by John George Hohman; El Monte and Reglas de Congo by Lydia Cabrera; Hoodoo in Theory and Practice by Catherine Yronwode; The Master Book of Candle Burning by Henri Gamache; The Book on Palo by Raul Canizares; Secrets of the Psalms, The Sixth and Seventh Book of Moses, Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston.

On Shanté’s worktable, bath crystals, incense, and sachets were being weighed and placed in foil packets with dramatic, retro-looking labels featuring black cats, dice, lightning bolts, and flames. Bundled candles had been sorted by their use and color—green for money, red for love, purple for power, black for evil deeds, and white for opening the way. There were small flannel bags in similar colors in a section labeled “Mojo Hands.” There were loose herbs, roots to which the earth still clung, and perfume-sized bottles of anointing oil with scores of different names, the same ones on the packets of incense and sachets: “Van Van Oil,” “Do as I Say,” “Cast Off Evil,” “I Can You Can’t,” “Come to Me,” “Follow Me Girl.”

“‘Essence of Bendover Oil,’” he read. “Hey, dute, I think someone may have been using that on you—meaning me!” Addressing the interlocutor, he laughed, knowing what he thought he meant.

Outside, he sat propped against one of the buttresses of the great tree and glanced at the Saint Christopher. He’d wanted it inscribed “To Shanté…Love, Ran” but the jeweler had said there wasn’t room. “Love, Ran,” was all it said. Love, Ran… Fatigue stole over him and he lay down, hands behind his head, feet crossed, gazing up into the tree’s broad crown and listening to the rustling leaves. Beyond, great clipper ships of cumulus were sailing east through azure seas. On a journey, too, he thought. But where? Same place as you. Same place as me. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, the light had changed, and Shanté sat beside him with a book.

“Hey,” he said. “I didn’t hear you come.”

“I didn’t want to wake you.”

“Was I asleep?”

She smiled. “All afternoon.”

“Really? Damn…” He took a beat. “You know, this is an