Ran stood beside the bed with the expression people wear in waiting rooms.
“And do you talk to it?” Claire said.
“No, I can’t see it.”
“Does it talk to you?” Shanté asked.
“No, it can’t see me. But I hear it singing sometimes.”
“What does it sing?” said Shan.
“Rarrr-rarr-rarrr,” Hope answered, “rarr-ruh-rarr-rarr-rarr…”
Claire held her tighter in her arms. “It’s going to be all right.”
“Will you sleep with me tonight?”
“Yes, sweetie, Mommy will stay. I have to talk to Daddy first.”
“Leave it on, Daddy, okay?” Hope said as Ran reached for the light.
“Okay.” He brushed her hair back from her forehead and planted a kiss there.
“What happened?” Claire asked, in the hall.
“I don’t know,” Ran said. “We were just reading.”
“I didn’t tell you this before,” Shan said. “But in prendas of Zarabanda, the muerto always receives an animal helper…. A black dog.”
Ran and Claire both stared at her, and then Claire said, “Excuse us, Shan, I need to speak to Ran.”
“Listen,” she said as soon as Shan was gone, “I’ve had as much of this as I can stand. I’m going to take the kids and leave tonight.”
“And go where?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “To a hotel, I guess. I don’t want them exposed to this any further.”
“But they’ve already been exposed. Did you see what just happened?” He pointed to Hope’s door.
“What are you saying, Ransom? That our daughter is possessed?”
“I don’t know, Claire,” he replied. “I only know all this is coming from the pot, and we have to put our faith in Shan to tell us what to do.”
“Bullshit, Ran. I don’t think the pot has anything to do with anything. And there is no ‘us.’ There’s only you. If anything is causing this, it’s you, that’s who: you, Ransom. You’re higher than a kite, and I’m, frankly, scared of you, and scared for Hope and Charlie, too.”
He gripped her arm. “You think I’d ever hurt you? You think I’d ever hurt our kids?”
“Let go of me,” she said.
He did. “Okay. Go, then, Claire. By all means, go. Teach them their dad’s a dangerous lunatic they need to be protected from. Teach them his friends of color—your friend, too—who practices a religion different from the one they taught you at St. Michael’s is a freak to be avoided at all costs. They may as well start learning the important lessons early.”
“You think they don’t already know? Their hearts are broken, Ran. You broke them. You, with all your craziness.”
“You bitch,” he said, and tears were running down his cheeks. “It’s not just me. We’re all involved in this. Every goddamn one of us, including Cell and Shan. After everything we’ve been through, you can’t do this one thing for me?”
“What, Ransom? What one thing?”
“Stay and see this through.”
She was clearly torn. “If I stay, Cell does, too.”
“Where?” asked Ransom. “Where does Cell stay, Claire?”
She hesitated, and her face was firm. “He can stay downstairs in the guest room.”
“Are you sure? You don’t want to put me there, and have him here upstairs in the master bedroom?”
“Ransom…” Her expression softened. She put her hand on his arm now. “Ransom, listen…”
“Are you fucking him?” he said. “Because if you are, Claire, if you are…” He held his finger in her face, and Claire stood like a deer gazing up into the crosshairs.
“Then what?” Her voice was soft.
Ransom turned away and didn’t walk toward the stairs. He ran.
FIFTY-FOUR
The winter of 1864 is bleak and some say biblical throughout the South. In Charleston, where once there were gay Secession balls and suppers, a Secession something somewhere every night, there are consolation parties now, where people drink and sing the Psalms till dawn, and women there, formerly considered proper, are fast like no place else.
But for Addie, at Wando Passo, it is during this time—as Jarry slowly convalesces from his punctured lung, as he lies in Percival’s old place, on Percival’s old chaise, and listens to her read until he falls asleep (they are on “The Prelude” now, having come, unspokenly, upon this common ground, which is, to them, a kind of Psalm)…It’s now that Addie has the thought she sometimes whispers to herself, but never speaks aloud: My true life has begun. And why does she not speak? Perhaps because it is with him, her dead husband’s brother, a Negro. Perhaps because it is so far from social Charleston and friends she knows would not forgive the feelings she has now, friends whose opinions she once cared about and even feared. Perhaps because it is without the carriages and jewels, the clothes from Mrs. Cummings’s shop. Perhaps because it is so small and humble, Addie’s life, in this quiet library, beside this fire, by the smoky light of tallow candles Addie made herself from the rendered fat of her own hogs…She could never have imagined any of these things, nor how happy she would be. But so she is, and so it has turned out to be. Yet there remains, despite their growing closeness, a reticence on Jarry’s part that Addie doesn’t fully understand or know how to relieve.
It’s the fifteenth of December, a frosty morning, when Jarry rises and accompanies her to the fields for the first time. Oliver and his crew are replacing a broken trunk, washed out by a high sea tide. It’s thirty-degree weather at eight o’clock when they arrive, but by eleven, nearing fifty. She and Jarry stand on a board atop the muddy dike and watch the men—waist-deep in cold black water—float the new trunk, a log of hollowed cypress, into place and seat it as the tide ebbs. They’ve cut three flatloads of fresh, good mud, and it becomes a race to pack the gate and firm it up before the tide comes in. Seeing need and, finally, unable to resist, Jarry grabs a hoe and joins them in the water over
