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

is they. That means they are close. And there are other ways, Addie, secret ways of which I cannot speak, except to say that they are more direct and awful, in the old sense of that word.”

And the strange thing is that it does not seem strange at all to Addie to have fallen so swiftly into this conversation with Harlan’s father, a conversation not quite like any she’s had before. “But how did you find your way into such things?”

“Ah, well,” says Percival, and as he gazes toward the window, a look of melancholy settles on his face. It’s the expression, Addie thinks, of a man at the end of a long journey, staring back over the wide plain he’s crossed, knowing he won’t retrace his steps. “In Cuba, when I was young—about your age—I went through a period of trouble. A crucial piece of my invention eluded me, and then my young wife, Melissa, Harlan’s mother, took suddenly ill. Hoping to cure her, I exhausted every available medical recourse, and then, when nothing worked, I sought…different help. That’s how I came to know Paloma. I failed to save Melissa, but my efforts led me through a door into a world that’s all but unknown here. The experience changed me.”

“How?” she asks.

“If you’re curious, we’ll speak of it another time. For now, let it suffice to say, I heard what are called the drums of affliction. I didn’t understand that it was them, the muertos, persecuting me.”

“Why were they persecuting you?”

“For the same reason they persecute us all: to make us change our life.”

Without prelude or apparent reason, Addie starts to weep, and it is less weeping than a single sob that, once got out, is gone. When she looks at Percival, his eyes have gone studious and deep. It’s Jarry’s look again, the look of one who knows some crucial truth concerning you that you have not yet learned or not yet found the strength to tell yourself.

“I’ve upset you,” he says, touching her hand.

“But you did change?”

“Ah, well, Addie, there’s the rub. I changed to some degree. But what I encountered there required still deeper changes that I failed to make. That failure has touched everybody here.” He briefly holds her stare, then something draws his attention to the window. Turning, Addie sees Clarisse, her black dress sharp against the white sand road. She’s carrying the plate, and what strikes Addie in the moment is that Clarisse is walking not toward the river, but away from it, and not to sunlight, as her mother asked, but westward toward the forest, where she presently disappears into the shadows of the trees.

When she turns back, Percival is studying her. “But I hadn’t meant to be so heavy. If I forget myself, it’s because your face is too good to deceive. I’ll kiss you. May I kiss you then?”

She smiles. “You may.” As she leans to him, Addie catches a whiff of age like soured milk, not quite hidden by the clove he chews. To her surprise, she feels her hair stir with intaken breath, as the old man smells her, too.

“Now let us speak about more cheerful things…. You’ve brought a book, I see. They’ve told me you are literary.”

“‘They’?” She smiles. “I expect ‘they’ did not intend it as a compliment.”

“Well, dear girl, this is South Carolina, after all, where reading for pleasure, much less for instruction, is on a social par with spreading the wet leprosy.”

She laughs gratefully at this. “Yes, in Charleston, they say I drove away my beaux with poetry. The young men there regard me as a sort of Hester Prynne, only in lieu of a scarlet letter, I wear a scarlet number on my breast.”

“What number might that be?”

She touches the spot. “At the moment, it is thirty-three.”

He smiles. “Well, if it’s any consolation, from where I sit—or lie—you seem barely whelped to me. And look around you at these heavy shelves. You see where I have come to die, like an old man returning to the nursery, surrounded by the broken toys of youth.”

“Not broken, though, surely?” Addie says. “Tell me one does not outgrow one’s books.”

“Sadly, yes, for me. In my youth, I was a reader. I searched through all these volumes, seeking one that could tell me the one thing I wished to know.”

“And what was that?”

“How to live—what other question is there?”

“And you were disappointed?”

“I never found an answer, and eventually reading came to seem another drug, more benign, but not so different finally from laudanum or alcohol, a distraction from the very thing I sought to do: namely, living. And if the great ones—even Wordsworth, even Shakespeare—couldn’t tell me how to live, to whom shall I turn now to teach me how to die? That is the lesson I’ve gone to school to now. Its rigor is so preoccupying and severe that, in comparison, the thought of opening a book seems puny.”

Addie, for whom reading has been a kind of personal religion, unquestioned and unquestionable, doesn’t quite know how to take this. “Well, I hope when my time comes, I have the courage to face it as a lesson, too.”

“I’m sure you shall. Never fear, my dear.”

“Aren’t you…?”

“Afraid? Of course. Aren’t you afraid of what will happen when you and Harlan go upstairs tonight? Of course you are, yet go you will. You know you must. An irresistible power compels you, and the same draws me. I’m afraid and drawn in just that way.”

“Death is different, though, isn’t it? What I fear is the thought that I may cease.”

“Ah, then we are different there,” he says. “That, I don’t fear in the least. I’m certain there is further life. My sole concern is what that life may be. But enough of this! Enough of me! What volume have you brought?” She hands it to him, and he holds it at arm’s length. “Byron! Madam! Is this fit matter for one newly entered into the married state?”

“What, must I