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

wife, his children, his past success, his hope of future happiness in life, and, in the deepest way, himself—was the girls on their chaises by the pool, separated from him by the railing’s iron bars. Sunning on their stomachs, bikini straps undone, they held their polka-dotted tops as they raised up to watch these interesting developments, and one of them—Ran didn’t know her name, but he could see her still, in Wayfarers—took a cherry coke in a tall glass that Wallace, in livery now, brought her from the clubhouse on a tray. Pursing her lips around the straw, she sipped and watched to see if the caddy boy beside the row of carts would stoop to take his pay. Ransom, who had earned the money, left it lying where it was and walked away with nothing to show for his morning but hurt feelings and blisters on his heels. For all he knew, those two damp bills were still out there blowing through the universe, still unclaimed, still his.

“Doddy?”

Ran looked up into Charlie’s curious stare. Charlie blinked, then stared down into the grate. “What you looking for down dere, Doddy?”

“The keys to the highway,” Ransom answered, without hesitation, at Charlie’s level, face-to-face and man-to-man.

Charlie extended his small fist and opened.

“And there they are,” said Ran. Wiping his sleeve across his eyes, he sat back on the curb, took a gasping breath, and stood. “Ho, shit—hoo-ah! Come on, team, pile in.”

As he strapped them in, however, the sounds of a minor fracas drifted up the street.

“There he is!” said someone—it sounded like Alberta Johns.

When he looked back toward Tildy’s, the young policewoman had a finger pointed straight between his eyes. “You, there, stop!” she shouted. “You, don’t move! Stop that man!” Fumbling her hat on, she started running up the block, gun and nightstick pummeling her sides.

The Charlestonian in cashmere looked at Ran, at her, at Ran again, then set off toward them at a sprint. “You there! Stop!”

“Don’t mess with me,” Ran warned, opening the driver’s door.

“What’s going on here?” He grabbed Ransom’s shoulder.

Ransom stepped out and knocked him down.

“Daddy! Daddy, don’t! Don’t, Daddy!” Hope screamed in back, but Ran had zeroed in.

“These are my kids,” he said, “mine, motherfucker. Not yours. You understand?” Ran stood over him, a big man, crazed and utterly committed. “Nod for yes.”

The Charlestonian nodded, surprised, apparently, to find himself afraid.

What surprised him in the moment—Ran, the pacifist, who’d dodged the draft and forgone meat for thirteen years—was the sudden soaring sense he felt, the electric zing that shot through his meridians, not a sense of trespass, but command.

The young officer had now arrived, flushed and panting, holding down her hat. “Stop right there,” she said, out of breath and frightened, unsnapping the retaining strap on her service .38.

Ran faced her, calm and eagle-eyed. “These are my children,” he explained. “I’m their father. I’m taking them for ice cream. If you’re going to shoot me, go the fuck ahead.”

In the backseat, both kids were crying now. “Doddy! Doddy!”

“Please don’t shoot him!”

“Don’t shoot Doddy!”

“I can’t let you go,” she said.

Ransom smiled at her the way a man smiles at a child, then climbed into the Odyssey and pulled, unhurriedly, away.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Health, as it returns, is like water from a cool, sweet well, and Addie takes measured sips in these first days, savoring it the way she has few things before. But where is Jarry? Sitting dressed beside the window, staring out into the park, she waits and wonders why he doesn’t come. Into her green reverie, the voice speaks and says, He is afraid. But she is frightened, too; it’s as if the permission her near death extended them has been withdrawn by her return to life. And how are they to find each other now? The answer isn’t far to seek: if permission is withdrawn, then she must give it to herself. Addie finds a pretext for a visit in a borrowed volume on her shelf.

So today, for the first time since their conversation at the Bluffs, she dresses and goes down, moving tentatively, gripping the banister as she passes in review before the disapproving ancestors, with Percival’s Wordsworth in one hand to steady her.

The May morning is halcyon and still. Walking down the white sand road, she follows voices to the cooper’s shop, where she finds Jarry with a half dozen men in elated conference.

“Good morning.”

“Mistis.” The men stand back, and Jarry—who wears a shirt of clean white homespun with the sleeves rolled past the elbow—smiles and nods her toward an open barrel. “Come look.”

Inside is a gray, cloudy substance, like translucent ocean sand, still slightly damp.

“Taste it,” he says, with the expression of a man enjoying fresh success.

Addie dips her finger. “Wherever did you get it?”

“We made it.”

“How on earth does one make salt?”

“Would you like to see?”

“Very much.”

So, while he rigs the sloop, she has the women in the kitchen house prepare a basket lunch, and they set out eastward, running before a light west wind, through the winding thoroughfare of Wando Passo Creek. Before they’ve gone a hundred yards, they come upon the laundress, Hattie, and her crew of girls, cutting up along the bank as they do wash. Dipping the clothes in kettlefuls of suds, the girls throw them onto wooden stretchers and beat them with wide-bladed paddles known as battling sticks. The thwacks resound, following them for half a mile downstream.

“‘Purge me with hyssop…,’” Addie says under her breath.

“What?” he calls out from the stern.

She smiles and shakes her head. “Do you suppose life uses us that way?” she asks instead. “Beats the dirt and sinfulness away so that, at the last, we shall be clean?”

He smiles, and doesn’t answer. There’s no need; but it is like the day’s motif.

Over the hissing bow wave, the drumming flutter of the edge of the taut sail, talk becomes impracticable, but they converse in looks and smiles, and Jarry occasionally points things out—a great blue