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

life is new and tenuous and thin, and anything—a tossed stone, a breath of wind—could rouse those still black waters, and life, beneath that wave of blood, would cease.

This is evil. The voice speaks in Addie’s mind, and she becomes aware there’s something watching her. It’s in the tree above her head. For a moment, Addie can’t tell what it is. It’s like nothing she’s ever seen, but then it moves, its feathers give off oily gleams, and Addie sees it is a large black crow. It turns its head, regarding her severely from its polished obsidian eye; then, with an angry caw, it spreads its wings and flies off, croaking, through the trees.

Addie starts to run again. The last light leaves. She runs and runs until she can’t run anymore and then falls, panting, to her knees. She lies, facedown, where she falls, her cheek against the ground. Somehow this position eases her. She’s afraid to move, afraid that motion might reawaken her distress. Her heartbeat lifts her up and down, a little less each time. She falls asleep and dreams she’s arguing with Harlan. It’s a bitter fight. “What have you done to me?”

Her own cry awakens her, and she sits bolt upright, thinking of Clarisse, her manner on the porch. What is between them—this is crystal clear to Addie now—is something old, not new. And the others—Paloma, Jarry, Percival—they all know. Of course they do. “Stanzas to Augusta,” Jarry’s look—this is what it meant. When she stepped off the gangway onto shore, he knew what she was stepping into. The Negro brother pitied her, but Harlan, the good white son, smiled and let her come. And why? Why, she thinks, did Harlan marry me? Addie cannot answer it. All she knows is that no human being, no enemy, has given her as hard and cruel a blow as her new husband, who vowed to love and honor her, who was supposed to cherish her and hold her dear. In the moment, Addie doesn’t know if she can bear up under it and live.

Night has fallen now. The old moon, like a hard mint that has been sucked thin, is setting over the trees, where cicadas chirr their long, uninterrupted note, and mole crickets, their broken, intermittent ones. Addie is wet and starts to shiver. The April night is cold, and cold becomes an agony she can barely stand. And yet she does stand it, and gradually the shivering stops, and she no longer feels the cold, feels almost warm, in fact. Something in her—not the self she mostly knows—something she remembers, though not from where, makes peace with the cold on her behalf. And now here, in the dark, trilling forest, as the old moon sinks, the voice begins to speak again, more clearly. It doesn’t say, You’ve been betrayed. It doesn’t answer why or what it means. It says, You married without love. And unlike yesterday, when the voice seemed an imposition, a sparrow to be shooed out of the house, now, as Addie’s thoughts slow down, as anger cools, she listens and replies. You’re right. She says the words aloud. “You’re right, I did.” And then the next phrase in the conversation comes. “I’m lost. I have forgotten how to live.” Addie thought she came to Wando Passo for a new life to begin, but now it seems that something brought her here for her old life to end. She starts to cry. There’s sadness here, and it is deep, but, deeper still, the truth, long feared, upon arrival, proves a relief. “I’m lost. I have forgotten how to live.” She repeats it like a prayer, to what or whom she doesn’t know. What Addie knows, and all she knows, is it’s the one true prayer that’s ever passed her lips.

Compared to it, the words she spoke in church, the vows that she exchanged with Harlan at the altar at St. Michael’s, “I take her…him…for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part,” are like something muttered in a dream. It comes to her that, once upon a time, someone who believed as she believes right now made up those words and then told others to believe and speak them, too. But those words were true just once, for that one person in the crucial, stinging hour of belief—not anymore. Now those words are dead, and when she and Harlan sleepwalked down the aisle and spoke them at the altar, they were just talking in their sleep. The only words that are fully wakeful and alive for Addie now are those she’s learned and ceaselessly repeats. And then she asks the question, “Will you help me?” and the voice she knows but doesn’t know from where says, Yes.

This is where Addie is when the first cock crows, and, hours later, when the gray light in the east turns celadon and silhouettes the trees. She’s on the edge of the water meadow she passed last night, or another like it. It’s carpeted with lily pads, sending up their celery-green stalks, hundreds of vertical brushstrokes, each culminating in a flag of yellow flower, all inclining the same way on the same breeze. There are wild roses on the bank, and scarlet lobelia. There are ferns and pink saltatia, and birds flitting over the water, streaks of canary yellow, blue, and red, and all around her on the ground is a dark green vine she’s never seen before, with tiny white flowers whose scent is that of orange blossoms. And it’s as if the world Addie knew has been destroyed, and, overnight, another, fresh, has been created to replace it, or as if Addie herself has been destroyed, and her destruction has allowed her to see the world that always was, only this is deeper than seeing. She beholds.

Addie has no wish to leave, or ever to return to that other, prior world, but then she hears them start to call for