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

seems unable, after all, to keep her concentration fixed on this, and they are silent as the water finds the channeled ribs, rills along the door edge, drips onto the floor.

Dipping the sponge, Addie feels something on the bottom of the basin and lifts out a length of dripping chain. She meets Paloma’s gaze and blinks.

“Do you know why the top and bottom links are broken?” the old woman asks.

“Why?”

“To unloose, niña. You break the chain to set them free.”

“And the herbs?”

“The rue is what you smell. There’s agrimony in it. Other things.”

“It is Cuban?”

“Cuban? No, I learned it on this place, right here, when I was just about your age—no, even younger. When I first came, I knew no one but Percival. Everything was strange to me. I was grieving for my country and my child. An old woman, Binah, taught me things. There’s hyssop in it, too. ‘Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be whiter than snow.’”

“That’s from the Psalms.”

“Yes, Fifty-one. That is what you say when you’ve brought evil on yourself through your own acts, or for another who has done so. Thirty-seven, if you’re innocently wronged. Binah taught me this, and that you put the broken chain into the bath and stroke the body downward toward the feet and burn the candles upside down. All of it is to clean, to wash away, to protect and to reverse.”

“To reverse what?”

Paloma’s solemn face goes still more solemn now. “That, niña…that is what I do not know. There is something, though.” She juts her chin toward the corpse. “Look at him. Can you not see the trouble in his face? He’s troubled in his spirit, too. He has not gone. I feel him somewhere close.”

There is gooseflesh, suddenly, on Addie’s arms.

“He’s in a dark place, calling out. He’s trying to tell me where he is, and I want to help him—that’s why I set these lights and made the wash. But I’m angry, too. So angry, niña. I don’t know whether he’s betrayed us, or if we’ve been deceived.”

The older woman’s scrutiny is now so close and fierce that Addie feels the blood rush to her cheeks.

“It is hard, niña,” Paloma says, “very hard, at such a time as this, not to know the truth. And what is hard for me, for Jarry is harder still. You yourself, I think, know something about this.”

It is all Addie can do to hold Paloma’s stare and pray that her eyes, ill-suited to concealment, do not betray her. “How is he?” she asks, subdued.

“He’s not himself. But God sends him busy-ness to spare him grief.”

Addie wrings the sponge and stares down at the corpse, feeling wrung and twisted up herself. In such matters, her background has left no area of gray. But she has left the sunny path. She’s in the woods. This is the moment Addie recognizes she has lost her way. “You’re free, Paloma. Harlan told me so upstairs just now.”

“And my son?”

“We can’t do without him, Paloma. But Harlan thinks the war may well be done by summertime.”

“And if it lasts ten years?”

“What am I to do?” asks Addie in frustration. “Do you expect me to step off the boat and start to tell my husband what to do?”

“No, niña, that is not what I expect of you.”

“Even if there were a will,” says Addie, “even if it freed him now, today, as you desire, it would make no difference. Harlan would oppose it in the courts, and he’d still have to stay. So, you see, it really makes no difference…You do see this, don’t you?”

Paloma shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter how long the war lasts, niña—if it lasts till all of us are dead or just one day. What matters to Jarry is what his father said to him in his last act. The worst thing about slavery, do you know what it is? I will tell you, niña. When you put a man in chains, you not only steal his body, you steal from him the truth of who he is.”

“How does slavery do that?” asks Addie, with a trace of heat. “No, I don’t see that, Paloma. It seems to me, you’ve both been treated fairly, and, in fact, quite well.”

“I will tell you how,” she says. “If you have two children, two sons, and say to one, ‘You are my child, you are a human being, when you grow up you will be a man like me,’ and to the other you say, ‘You are an animal, when you grow up I will putthe bit into your mouth and hitch you to the cart and make you pull.’…The first thing that will happen is that second child, if he is strong like Jarry, will resist you, he’ll rebel. But if his own father tells him this, the person he loves most and most respects, then that child’s heart will break, he’ll be destroyed, all but the strongest, and sometimes even they. This is how, niña, do you see? First you steal his body, then you steal the truth of who he is, that he is human, and when you’ve taken that, he cannot love himself. And when he cannot love himself, he cannot love you either, cannot love others or another, and when that’s done, then you have taken his humanity. Then he becomes an animal, in truth, and worse, far worse. Because an animal, even a wolf, is innocent, but a man who’s lost this no longer has a human soul, and when the soul is gone, then he is capable of any evil. He is capable of anything. I fought to keep my son from this, and I succeeded all these years. Now Percival has broken his last promise, and I’m afraid for Jarry, but who I fear for still more is Clarisse. Percival has brought this down on all of us, and even more so on himself.”

“You’re hard on him, Paloma,” Addie says, “too hard, I think. He loved