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

Good thinking. That never dawned on me.”

It didn’t?

“Absolutely not.”

Oh, sorry, then. My mistake. I thought there was an instant there….

“What instant? There was no instant.”

You know, when you were pacing back and forth maniacally, waving your arms, protesting your innocence, expressing your righteous indignation that the officers might consider you—you, of all people, the son of Melvin Hill—capable of violence…I thought there was a fleeting moment when you thought, What if it’s the Purdey? but didn’t say it.

“Well, you’re wrong. You’re wrong as hell. I don’t recall any such thought.”

Yes, well it was very subtle, very easy to forget….

“Hey,” said Ransom, “hey, screw you! Actually, if you want to get technical, what I remember thinking was, How can I give them the gun when I don’t know where the fucker is?”

You don’t know?

“Hell, no, I don’t know! Do you?”

Hmm, the voice said, in a musing tone. Nope, sorry. Nothing comes to mind.

“All right, wiseass, want me to show you? I’ll find the thing and turn it in.”

You do that, Ran.

“You think I won’t? Just watch me. I’ll prove it to your faithless, sorry ass.”

And, with that, he stalked off down the hallway with that slapping sole.

“Me!” he muttered. “Me!” indignantly. Exiting into the yard, he slammed the door so hard he almost broke the hinge.

TWENTY-NINE

There is a pungent smell of herbs, the sound of dripping water, then the louder sound of something being wrung—a cloth or sponge—into a basin or a pail.

Addie follows these into the formal parlor to the right of the curved stairs and finds Paloma silently washing the deceased. Percival is laid out on a door the carpenters have set on sawhorses. Except for a cloth across his loins, he’s naked, and his body is almost shocking in its whiteness, shocking and impressive in its size and strength, above all in its seeming youth. Except for the unnatural pallor and a deflated slackness in the lower belly, he does not look old. Addie thinks about Achilles on his shield, she thinks about a painting of the Deposition she once saw. Lifting one slack arm—which seems to condescend to its manipulation with tender indifference—Paloma swabs it with a sponge, moving from the shoulder to the wrist. She washes each finger individually and turns and does the palm, stroking from the heel toward the fingertip. And as she works, the water drips onto the cooling board and onto towels on the floor.

The scene is as intimate as that between two aged lovers in the bath, a husband and a wife. As quietly as possible, Addie starts to leave, but a floorboard creaks.

“What is it, niña?” Paloma’s voice is calm and self-possessed, but her face, when Addie turns, is terrible, a mask of bitter, angry grief. She isn’t crying now, but her eyes are red and sunken and her cheeks are streaked.

“I’m sorry, Paloma. It’s nothing. We’ll speak of it another time.”

The old woman makes no answer. She stands, in a brown study, staring into space.

In Addie, a pang of sympathy vies against an urge to flee. “Paloma, can I help you?”

“No, you cannot help me. What is it you think to do?”

Addie hesitates, but it is brief. Crossing to Paloma now, she gently wrests the sponge away and leads her toward a chair. “Come,” she says. “Come, and rest yourself a bit.”

“He must be washed and dressed.”

“I know. I know he must. But you sit here and tell me what to do.”

The old woman neither consents nor actively resists. Sitting in the rocker, she takes a white candle from the stand and holds it at arm’s length, widening her eyes. To Addie’s distress, Paloma strikes a match and starts to light the bottom.

“Can I do that for you?”

“No.”

“But, Paloma, you’re lighting the wrong end.”

“I’m lighting what I mean to light,” she says. “If you want to help me, do this other the same way. Scrape the wick up with your nail. There, like that. Now, place them to either side of him, and, niña, when you wash him, wash downward, to his feet, not up. Up is to draw. Down, to take away.”

Disturbed by these instructions, Addie nonetheless complies and doesn’t ask. The coolness of the body is unnerving and the way the flesh, when touched, retains the impress and does not spring back. What unnerves her even more is that Percival, at close quarters, does not seem dead. His eyes are closed exactly as they were when she first saw him on the chaise, as though that moment were premonitory of this. His expression, though, suggests a suffering no longer calmly borne. He looks like someone ill from poisoning or drink, who’s closed his eyes to take a miserable rest but cannot sleep.

“Paloma, if I haven’t said so, I’m sorry for your loss.”

“No, you haven’t said so. But I thank you. You, too, have had a blow.”

Addie looks up now, and Paloma simply holds her stare, her old eyes fearsome, not with enmity, but with long experience of life.

“How are you, niña?”

“It’s in the past, Paloma,” Addie says. “How can I blame them for what they didn’t know?”

“No, niña, it is how they acted when they learned—that is what there is to blame them for.”

This swift, cutting intuition, Addie thinks, Jarry got that from her.

“What is it you came to ask?”

“I was thinking of the clothes we lost. We can speak of it another time.”

“What about them?”

“I wondered if we might not do some sewing here. I can knit, and I thought that we—or I—could perhaps begin with a new set of stockings for the crop hands, then—”

“Yes,” Paloma cuts her off, “in the old days, not so many years ago, before the cloth from England and the Northern mills got cheap, we did that on the place. But, niña, there are four hundred people here. That is eight hundred stockings, eight hundred feet.”

“But it cannot take so long, can it?” says Addie. “A single sock?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps.” Paloma