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

and he hesitates, then hands the cup to her as he has drunk from it, with the untouched rim toward her. Addie, on an impulse, turns and drinks from the same spot where he has placed his lips. When she looks, his eyes are blurred and hot.

“See what we have,” she tells him with a thrilling jolt of confidence, and she lays out their simple feast. There are boiled new potatoes, and slices of cold, thick bacon left from breakfast, hoecake and warm buttermilk together with the eggs, and salt so fresh it tastes of woodsmoke from the fire.

“And look what else…” Swaddled in the folds of cloth is Jarry’s father’s Wordsworth.

“I thought you found him dull.”

“I’m hoping you may lift my sights.”

“Perhaps you overestimate my abilities.”

Addie laughs. “Is that a slur on them or my intelligence?”

For once, her swiftness flusters him. “I didn’t mean…”

His answer peters out, and Addie leaps into the breach. “You never finished telling me the story of this poem.”

His expression settles. “Didn’t I?”

She shakes her head, and Jarry looks away. “Where did I leave off?”

“You said you tried to harm yourself. Percival rescued you. You accused him of Thomas’s death. What did he say?”

“He told me I was right. Thomas’s blood was on his hands. He said, ‘Hate me, if you wish, but don’t hate life.’ He said that there’s a beauty in humanity that, if I died, I’d lose the opportunity to see. He asked me what I wanted, and I answered, ‘Freedom,’ and he told me, ‘There are two, Jarry, and the first, the one you seek, is the shallower of the pair. I know, because I have it; I own it as my birthright and feel no freer than you. That first freedom is the only one I can give or take from you, but there’s a second, deeper freedom no man can deprive you of, even if he takes your life. I’ve sought it since I was your age, and it eludes me still, but I’ve learned something on the way. I at least know more than you. And I’ll show you where it lies, and how to look for it, and why, but only if you give your word you won’t attempt to take your life again. Will you make that pact with me?’ He held out his hand.”

“And you took it,” Addie says.

“I took it.”

“And then?”

He picks up the book. “He took this from the shelf and read the poem to me.”

“Read it to me now,” she whispers.

Weighing the request, he holds her stare and then begins.

Closing her eyes, Addie sees the poet walking on the moors. It’s a beautiful morning. The sun is shining after rain. At first, he feels at one with everything. “‘The air is filled with pleasant noise of waters…. The hare is running races in her mirth.’”

On reencounter, Wordsworth pleases her in a way he never did at school. What struck Addie then as dull seems plain with high intention now. And there’s something in Jarry’s delivery—something quiet, passionate, sure-footed, clear—that’s ravishing to watch, like a fine horse running in a field.

But then the mood turns….

“‘But, as it chanceth, from the might

Of joy in minds that can no further go,

As high as we have mounted in delight

In our dejection do we sink as low;

To me that morning did it happen so….’”

As Jarry reads, it comes to her that he’s revealing the central moment of his life, and her mood turns as well. For it’s his life. Jarry’s. It’s happening out there. He’s opening to her, revealing the best part of himself, while she cowers in the darkened theater, hiding her worst. And Addie thinks, What if I told him? What if I shattered it? What if the foundation stones were shaken, and I let them shake? What might happen then? Might that finally be it, the beginning of her own true life?

She doesn’t, though, and as Jarry goes on reading, the poet sees an old man in the distance, staring down into a pool.

“‘At length, himself unsettling, he the pond

Stirred with his staff, and fixedly did look

Upon the muddy water, which he conned

As if he had been reading in a book….’”

“Goodness. You’ve made the hair stand on my arms,” Addie comments, rubbing them.

Jarry meets her gaze. “I felt just the same when Father first read it to me.”

The poet accosts the old man, and they speak. He’s a leech gatherer, seeking the creatures in the pools to sell. Pleasantries are exchanged. The old man shares a few particulars of his profession. Apart from that, the meeting is entirely commonplace. Yet, by the time they part, the poet’s mood has turned again.

“‘…when he ended,

I could have laughed myself to scorn to find

In that decrepit man so firm a mind.

“God,” said I, “be my help and stay secure,

I’ll think of the leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!’”

“So Percival,” she says when he concludes, “whom you’d run away from, from whom you were estranged…”

“I hated him.”

“Percival, whom you hated, read you this…and then?”

“He asked me what has changed.”

Addie blinks.

“What in this encounter has turned the poet’s thoughts from”—Jarry seeks the line—“‘Solitude, pain of heart, distress and poverty,’ back to life?”

“And what has? Did he explain?”

“Father explained nothing,” Jarry answers. “He shoved the book into my chest and bade me go and find the answer for myself.”

“And you did.”

“I read this poem for two and a half…” He looks away. “Two and a half years. It’s hardly too much to say that it was my whole education. The day I came to him…That day, he said, ‘You are my son. If you’ll work for me, I’ll try to be a father and a friend to you, and I will free you when I die.’” Jarry’s eyes are brimming. He doesn’t try to hide them from her now.

Slipping beside him, Addie rests her hand on his broad back. “So you came to love him in the end.”

He looks away over the sea. “He was that old leech