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

His face lost all its muscle tone.

“Ransom…”

“Are you kidding? You don’t think I’m fucking with the recipe?” His expression was like Charlie’s, caught red-handed in the jelly beans.

In Claire’s face, experience vied woefully against belief. “That’s important, Ran. That’s number one on the must-do list.”

“Can’t it be the to-do list, Claire? The please-do list? You know about my little problem with authority.”

“Deal with it.”

Ransom’s jaw squared, but he managed a salute. “Yes, ma’am, Miss Claire.”

And off they went.

FOURTEEN

There’s something just beneath the leaves. It shocks you when you touch it with your hand, but at first it’s easy to convince yourself that you imagined it. In the interval it takes to blink, your life has changed, but it takes time, inevitably, to realize it, and more time still before you dig it up and find out what it is.

For Addie, the blow is so sudden, swift, and hard she can’t be absolutely sure that she’s been hit. Only tomorrow, or tonight, will the soreness and the bruise appear as evidence. And in this state, half stunned, like a somnambulist, she follows Paloma through the closed doors to the library, where Percival, attended by his physician, lies on his chaise, as though in state.

Beside him, on a small table draped with a white cloth, several candles burn, their flames reflected in six or seven gilded sherry glasses filled with water. These are arranged around a larger glass—a snifter—in which an iron crucifix is half submerged, and there are white carnations in a bowl and a half dozen tintype portraits.

As they come in, the doctor, rolling down his sleeves, looks up and smiles with pressed lips, the way physicians smile when there is something to be faced. Percival’s robe is open on his breast, which is as smooth and white as marble. Against it, several black leeches—recently applied, still small—throb silently at their work against the lapis-colored veins. The patient’s face, which is one of great refinement, is lifted toward the ceiling in an attitude of suffering calmly borne, and the slanting sunlight through the window casts shadows in the sockets of his closed eyes, suggesting statuary even more. His head is noble, heavy, overlarge, almost equine in its length and strength of bone, and seems somehow inconsistent with sickness, age, or death, and, in truth, he seems less old than ruined.

“Percival,” Paloma whispers.

When he opens his eyes, there’s a brief look of vagueness and disorientation, like someone surfacing from a depth. Taking Addie in, he doesn’t smile, but there is something kind, relaxed, and deep in Percival’s expression that puts her at her ease. It reminds her of the look that Jarry gave her from the docks and emanates from the same agated, dark hazel eyes. Searching for her husband’s likeness in his father, Addie finds instead his other son.

“‘He said that, gathering leeches, far and wide,’” he says, pressing the physician’s arm,

“‘He traveled, stirring thus about his feet

The waters of the pool where they abide….’

“Do you recognize the poet?”

“I would have to venture Wordsworth,” she replies.

“And you would be correct. And you, I think, are Adelaide, our bride. You have met Paloma. Do you know Dr. Sims?”

“How do you do.”

“Congratulations,” Sims replies. “I wish you every happiness. Percival, I’ll leave you now. Paloma, may I have a word?”

As the two withdraw, Percival indicates the chair. “Sit down, my dear, and let us have a visit. They say your outbound journey was more stimulating than you might have wished.”

“For my aunt’s sake, yes,” she answers, sitting. “For my part, I found it curiously exalting.”

“Did you?” Addie reads approval like a subtle index in his eyes; warmed thereby, she warms reciprocally toward him. “If this is distasteful”—he indicates his chest—“I can cover them.”

“No. They must be painful, though.”

“Surprisingly, no. In fact, after the small ache of the bite, I find they have an anesthetic quality. I much prefer them to the lancet and the bleeding bowl. Tell me, though, do you find Wando Passo to your liking?”

“It’s…extraordinary.”

Percival’s expression sobers, as though some equivocation has crept into her tone. “Our customs, I expect, are strange to you.”

“No, I…”

His glance follows hers to the table with the candles and the crucifix. “You may ask, if you’re curious.”

“Is it a shrine?”

“Of sorts. It’s called a bóveda. They’re found in many Cuban homes.”

“It is Catholic?”

“Some Catholics have them, but they got them from their Negroes. The African, you see, venerates his ancestors in much the way the Cuban nobleman and the white aristocrat of Charleston do.”

Addie smiles.

Percival’s failure to return it makes clear that he does not intend this as a drollery. “The difference,” he goes on, “is that we worship them as the departed, as something dead and gone. To them, though, the dead, the muertos or nfumbi, are no farther off than those people outside in the garden. Listen.” He holds a finger up. “Hear the drone of conversation? Sometimes, lying here, I fancy I can hear the dead like that. And if I’m very quiet, very still, I begin to pick out actual words. And there are windows and doors, Addie, by which they can reenter the living world again and show themselves and speak. A bóveda is such a place, and that is what this is to me, a place where I can offer thanks and ask them for their help and they can answer me…. But I’ve often thought there are few things more tedious than unsolicited accounts of others’ spiritual convictions, which one does not share oneself.” And now, for the first time, he smiles.

“How do they speak, though?” Addie asks, ignoring his disclaimer, not bored in the least.

“In ways you’d recognize, ways you’ve experienced a thousand times. In dreams. Through what we call ‘intuition.’ A sudden flash of brilliant understanding, an insoluble problem suddenly solved. When chills run along your spine.”

“How curious, look,” she says, showing him the gooseflesh on her arm. “Just as you spoke…”

“Yes, niña, that