Back to Wando Passo by David Payne

Author:David Payne [Payne, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2008-12-20T06:00:00+00:00

Reverend Hilliard is a thin, bald man with an ascetic face and steel-rimmed spectacles that seem at odds with lavish vestments. From the Book of Common Prayer, he reads the Burial of the Dead to those lately assembled on the shore of the black pond, under the cypress, and to those already here, beneath the mossy stones, who’ve heard the words before.

“‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts. Shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer….’”

As he reads, Addie’s gaze drifts over the small crowd to Paloma, and to Jarry at her side. Clarisse is absent, and Addie wonders at this briefly, but it’s Jarry’s face that occupies her thoughts. His head is bowed, and he looks fretful and intense. His collar and clothes are disarranged, as if he’s slept in them, if he has slept at all. His eyes are red, and he looks drunk or slightly mad.

“‘Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and most merciful Savior, thou most worthy Judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.’”

Moving in a kind of dream, she watches Harlan throw his clod of earth and throws her own. In a kind of dream, she takes the white musk rose he breaks from Jarry’s climber, holds the stem as Harlan kisses her, and mounts his horse.

“I’m sorry, Addie, at how poorly this began.”

The sun is behind him; looking up, she has to shade her eyes. “Godspeed, my dear.”

“I wish I could stay,” he says, but even with the sun behind him, Addie sees his eyes stray to the tree line and the road. In them is a sheen she’s seen in dogs before the hunt, and she can tell that, even as he speaks the words he thinks he means, he’s eager to be gone.

“Go,” she tells him. “And know that I’ll pray always for your swift and safe return.”

He leans down and kisses her, and then, at a soft canter, he rides away down the white road, toward the vanishing point where the lines of trees converge in the allée.

Watching, Addie feels a subtle sense of letdown, and the clear thought comes to her, That wasn’t it…. Marriage hasn’t proved to be the plausible beginning of the beginning she had hoped. But under disappointment looms the sudden sense of possibility, the same she felt three days ago, standing in the Nina’s bows, as though perhaps now it, true life, can start.

Harlan is gone now, and when she turns, the park opens like the green world of a fairy tale, and coming toward her through it, also moving in a kind of dream, is Jarry. As she waits, Addie’s heart is beating out a heavy klaxon in her chest, and she does not know why, or ask, or what will happen when he comes.

When he arrives, she smiles, but he does not.

“Yesterday, when we came back from the swamp,” he says, direct, without preliminaries, “you were about to tell me something….

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