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

mean to face them. If you’re going to run, the gate’s right there. Get the fuck out of my house.”

“I can’t go home, Shanté,” he said, and Ran was weeping now. “I can’t.”

She put her arms around him. “Why not?”

“Because,” he said, “a long time ago, this unhappy white guy just like me came back from the war and caught his wife having an affair with a black man, Shan…just like Claire and Cell, you see? And he killed them, Shan, he shot them in cold blood, and their bodies turned up with this pot. And if I go back now…”

“You’re telling me you’re going to hurt Marcel and Claire?”

“I’m telling you, what if it’s not me? What if the goddamn pot is causing this, leading me where they all went?”

“Is that what you believe?”

“It is.” Ransom didn’t hesitate. “It really is.”

Shanté took an appraising beat. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, Ran, listen. There’s evil in the world. I’ve seen it. In the Congo, there are witches called ‘kindoki.’ Everybody there believes in them. It’s usually someone in the village, next door, down the street, even a member of your family, who flies out at night in dreams and eats your soul. The people that happens to? They die, unless they’re helped. Helping them is part of what I learned to do. And there are worse things than witches, Ran, deep-level demonic forces that prey on certain individuals, and I’m here to tell you, there are outcomes far more undesirable than death. In Conjure, people in that state are considered crossed. Crossing is real, but it’s also rare. Many people who think they’re crossed are really just dealing with garden-variety mental illness, unhappiness, bad luck. There’s a chance that’s all this is with you. That’s clearly what Claire thinks. But the one thing you’ve said that gives me pause…really, there are two. First, what you say you found inside this pot is pretty much what I’d expect to find inside a prenda. It’s called the ‘carga.’ It’s what makes it live and work. But let me tell you what a prenda is….”

She opened the volume she was holding, a slim white one, to the place her finger marked. “This book is by Lydia Cabrera. She was a Cuban ethnographer, a student of Ortiz. She’s dead now, but she’s still regarded as the preeminent academic authority on Palo.” She showed him the cover. La Regla Kimbisa del Santo Cristo del Buen Viaje. “‘The Kimbisa Order of the Holy Christ of the Good Journey.’ It’s a study of a line of Palo called Kimbisa. This is what Cabrera says: ‘A prenda or nganga’—that’s the Bantu term—‘is the pot in which dwells…el alma de un muerto…the soul of a dead person…’”

She glanced at him over her rims. “‘…sometido por su voluntad y mediante un pacto con el individuo que le rinde culto’…subject by his will and by means of a pact with the individual who pays him homage…and whom the muerto helps…con su poder de ultratumba…with his supernatural—literally, ‘beyond-the-tomb’—power. So: An nganga is the pot in which dwells the soul of a muerto, subject by his will and by means of a pact with the individual who pays him homage—who ‘feeds him’—and whom the muerto helps with his supernatural power.”

“Wait,” said Ran. “‘Feeds’? Who feeds whom?”

“The Palero feeds the muerto.”

“Feeds it what?”

“Life-force offerings. Blood, primarily.”

The silence now resembled that which follows a hundred-year snowfall.

“What was the other?” Ransom finally said.

“The other what?”

“You said there were two things.”

“The one way to dissolve a prenda—the only way, so far as I’m aware—is to bury it in an anthill.”

“It’s real, isn’t it,” Ran said. “Holy shit.”

“Let me fetch some things out of the house, and we’ll go see.”

FORTY-FIVE

Once a fortnight…then once a week…then every second night Addie senses the presence in the house. She often lies awake in bed till dawn, then, in the fields, drives herself to exhaustion and far past, dreading the hour when she must return and light the lamp alone.

And the news is all so terrible…Tom Wagner, killed at Fort Moultrie, when one of his own cannon exploded during a routine inspection. The new battery on Morris Island, from which Harlan writes, is named for Tom. And Jimmy Pettigru, who had such a clear, fine face and ringing laugh, and Will Porcher, Addie’s cousin, with whom she danced the German at her first St. Cecelia’s, and Thad Middleton, for whom she never cared (but, oh, his mother, and his sister, Ann), and David Guinn, who had such pretty curls, such a fine seat on a horse (he made her heart beat once, if only for a week), and Mitchell Ball, that sad, soft something in his eye that always broke her heart…The roll is called, and those who answered, flushed and laughing, in the bosom of their families as recently as Christmastide—in the high mood after Fredericksburg, as the plowmen at Wando Passo broke the squares behind the oxen—are ghosts before the new rice pips in April, when they let the Sprout Flow off. There is hardly a house in Charleston without black crepe at the door.

When the Federal shells begin falling, her aunt’s house, which escaped the fire, takes two hits through the roof within a week. Blanche has gone to Addie’s cousin, Delphine, in Cheraw. “And you, my dearest child,” she writes, “should come here, too. You’re no longer safe, with Federal gunboats running up the river at their pleasure as they do. And the Negro troops, they say, under Higginson and Wentworth, these Boston men, are pitiless in their revenge against masters who put the very bread into their mouths and were their former friends. I fear for all of us, but mostly, Addie, you.”

There’s a day, and not just one, when Addie considers heeding this advice…. When the squares are “flowed,” as John, the minder, says, she’s careful not to look down, afraid of what she’ll see reflected back. Night, though,