“You laugh now, Jarry. Now you’re in the catbird seat. But one day soon, one day very soon, men I know—patriots like Booth, who feel as he felt and I feel—will make you acquainted with a branch of sourwood and the end of a short rope. And when they come for you, the night they ride into this yard, we’ll see who’s laughing then. We’ll see what noises come from your black throat. And I’ll show you, then, on that day, all the brotherly love you now show me.”
Now Harlan gets his gun and goes to shoot.
“He’s insane,” says Jarry as they watch him stalk off through the park.
“Do you think he knows?”
“If he doesn’t, he will soon.”
“Oh my God, Clarisse!” Addie exclaims. “She’ll tell him, surely. What are we to do?”
“What is there to do, but tell him first?”
“Oh, but Jarry, I’m afraid,” she says. “I’m afraid for both of us.” She takes his hand and puts it on her stomach now. “Shouldn’t we just take the boat and go?”
“And the people?” Jarry asks. “Beard Island? Everything we promised them? All the work they’ve done? Are we just to leave them to their fates?”
“What else can we do? The will is void.”
Now, the first blast of the gun…Jarry stares in that direction, and his jaw is tight. “I won’t run anymore.”
And, oh, at those words, such a lonely pang shoots through her. “Then we shall die of it,” she says, and looks away.
“I could slip down there right now,” he says. “We could take him up some nameless creek….”
She looks him in the eyes and shakes her head. “No, you couldn’t. And even if you did, it would ruin everything. Let me tell him. It should come from me.”
And, in the house, as Addie goes to change the sheets, as she bunches them and holds them to her face to catch their scent, she listens to the Purdey’s repeated roar from the landing down below. On and on into the afternoon it goes, and the thought of Wordsworth runs through Addie’s mind. “We poets in our youth…We poets in our youth…” But she’s too anxious and the rest won’t come. All she remembers is the sense: It begins with poetry, and ends in death.
FIFTY-SEVEN
“‘Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.
“‘Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight, that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest and be clean when thou judgest…’”
Sitting in the chair, her back discreetly to him, Shanté reads as Ransom wrings the sponge over his head, letting the scented water runnel down his face, his chest, his sides, laying tracks down in the hair of his uncovered legs, drumming softly in the iron basin of the tub. The bathroom window is still black, except for twinned candle flames reflected in the eddies in the pane. Burning on the sill and on the pedestal, both are white and both have been reversed, with new tops carved. Each has been dressed from one of Shanté’s vials. “Uncrossing Oil,” the label says, and at the bottom, among the culch of seeds and roots, there is a broken link of chain.
“‘Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow….’”
Awakened at the partners desk, his head on his crossed arms, Ran followed Shanté to the kitchen, watching, somber-faced with sleep, as she poured herbs in river water she had boiled. There was a yellow flower in the mix, dried and drooping on its stem, head bowed like a discouraged child. Ransom wondered what it was but didn’t ask.
“‘Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation, and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.
“‘For thou desirest not sacrifice, else I would give it; thou delightest not in burnt offering.’”
As she continues, he kneels and soaks up the spilled water at his feet and wrings it out again, washing, as instructed—“Up to draw,” she told him, “down to take away.”
“‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.’”
Nine times she reads the psalm, nine times he wrings the sponge. Then he collects the water in a basin, waiting, in the cool of morning, as gooseflesh forms, for the air to dry him. Then he dresses in white clothes—a T-shirt and a worn pair of chinos—and sets off down the allée, carrying the basin, barefoot and alone.
A saffron line, no wider than a pencil stroke, has appeared over the Pee Dee, and birds are singing in the yard.
As the sky lightens, Ransom knows what kind of day it is to be. It is that day. In Killdeer there was only one each year, when you walked outside and found that, overnight, the sky had lifted off. The air was clear, the humidity, gone. The smell of bright tobacco wafted from the warehouses on Depot Street downtown, and sounds carried—the ringing of the steeple bell of the First Methodist Church, and, sometimes, from the high school, the warlike whoops of boys and coaches on the football field, like soldiers reenacting some old charge that ended in defeat and yet, each fall, must be remembered and repeated and remembered and repeated still once more. It was the day you knew—or Ransom did—that fall was here and summer gone and not coming back. The feeling in his heart today is the same as it was then—the loneliness of knowing things must end, the grief that stabs, yet Ransom glimpses far, far down—a flash, and nothing more—how the wound, along its edge, is touched with sacredness. And what is this? All these years, Ran has forgotten there was ever such a day as this, yet here, again, it is.
More than anything he’s ever wanted, more than anything he’s wanted in this life and on this earth,
