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

her. She hears the deep note of the horn, and in the distance, dogs begin to bark. It isn’t long before Sultan and another hound appear out of the trees, their sad old heads—like something time has both compressed and stretched—looking oddly out of place on their lithe bodies. They’re followed shortly by a man on horseback. It’s Jarry. She is not surprised, but Jarry clearly is. Dismounting with his horse in stride, he lets it stop itself and runs to her.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m all right.”

“Thank God.” He goes down on his hams in front of her. “We were afraid you’d drowned. Did you not hear us call?”

“I heard.”

He pauses at her tone. The hounds, with swifter intuition, begin to wag their tails. They make a happy rush and lap her face, and she, enduring it, closes her eyes and lifts her chin. “Such charity,” she says, gently pushing them away.

“Have you been here all night?”

“Much of it.”

“You must be freezing.”

She shakes her head, but Jarry drapes his coat across her shoulders nonetheless. “We should let them know.”

“Not yet,” she says, and Addie’s cold, smooth face, for the first time, looks haggard. Fatigue swirls up into her eyes, like mud in a clear pool. “Please?”

He reaches out and lays a hand—not his whole hand, just a finger, the middle one, and just the tip of that—on her shoulder. Its pressure is so light that Addie might not be aware of it unless she saw it there. Yet her body, which is clenched from the long night against the cold, opens like a bud to flower, sensing kindness with an intuition like the hounds’. Slowly, softly, she begins to cry.

Jarry’s whole face concentrates. His eyes fill with sympathy.

“I saw them,” Addie says. “I followed him to the cottage. You told me not to, but I did.”

His look is grave. He rests his whole hand on her shoulder now. He doesn’t look away. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m afraid you may have taken fever.”

She shakes her head, but Jarry reaches out, and Addie sees the old scar on the underside of his left wrist. Her eyes go somber over it. They seek his out, but from some innate delicacy, he turns his hand, as though to hide what she already sees. With the back of his wrist, he touches her brow, a gesture brief and wholly circumspect, yet no man has ever touched her there. A conversation occurs between them, with troubled implication given and troubling inference received, in a single wordless glance.

“Why did he marry me?”

“To save himself.” Now Jarry sits.

Addie, who does not expect an answer, certainly not one so sure and swift as this, gazes into his eyes and weighs the truth of it.

“From her?”

He nods just once.

“That’s why you gave me the poem….”

“I gave it you because you were innocent and deserved the truth.”

Her eyes brim, showing him the gratitude she doesn’t speak. “There’s something I must tell you….”

“There’s something I must tell you, too,” he says. “Father died last night.”

“What? Jarry, no!” Her hand goes to his arm. “Oh, Jarry, I’m so sorry. And here you are, out chasing me. We should go back.”

“Yes,” he agrees, yet neither makes a move to leave. “Mother found him a little while ago. He had this strange expression on his face, as though something had come into the room, and whatever it was, it wasn’t what he was expecting.”

As the news settles, she lets her hand rest where it was. “I think he was ready, Jarry. He spoke to me about it. He seemed more curious than afraid. I hope, when my time comes, I can be half as brave.”

He makes no answer, gazing out over the water meadow, arms circling his knees. A time passes in silence there’s no need to relieve. “There’s a verse,” he says eventually. “It’s been playing through my head for weeks….

“‘The old man still stood talking by my side,

But now his words to me were like a stream

Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide.

And the whole body of the man did seem…’”

Briefly, emotion overcomes him, and Addie allows her grip to tighten on his arm till it subsides.

“‘And the whole body of the man did seem

Like one whom I had met with in a dream,

Or like a man from some far region sent

To give me human strength….’”

“It’s all right, Jarry….”

He shakes his head and cannot finish it.

“What is the poem?” she asks him, when a decent interval has passed.

“‘Resolution and Independence.’ That was the first poem he ever read to me.”

“How old were you?”

“Fifteen.”

“You were close….”

He shakes his head and wipes his eyes. “I hated him. Our friendship began over that poem.”

This is the moment Addie will remember, when she beholds who Jarry is, and it is not as a black man, not even as a man, that she recognizes him, but as a being like herself in a way no one has been before. Like a tuning fork that has lain inert till now, something in her rings responsively, as it hears, for the first time, the true, specific note that it was forged to answer. Her expression as she looks at him is no longer wan and drained. Her eyes have regained their depths. She nods to the snippet of green vine he’s plucked and is unconsciously twirling in his hand. “All morning I’ve breathed the scent of that and wondered what it was.”

“It’s partridgeberry. The old folks call it lovers’ vine.”

Addie blushes, but holds his stare. “Why do they call it that?”

He lifts the two white blooms. “When these flowers drop, they form a single berry with two eyes.”

The fatigue in him, Addie realizes now, is beautiful.

Jarry hands the snip to her. “What is it you wished to tell me?”

Now her expression drops as she recalls. “Last night I saw something, Jarry. In the swamp, as I was running. It was hidden in the hollow of a tree. It frightened me.”

“What did you see?”

“It