Shanté takes a palm nut from her box and breaks it on the corner of a grave. Taking four pieces, she casts them on the ground, observing how they fall, whether with the white meat up or down. Murmuring to herself, she starts off down the rows, casting at the foot of every grave, and Ransom sits and watches. Demoralized and out of gas, he looks down at the legend in the stone:
CAPT. HARLAN P. DELAY
21ST SOUTH CAROLINA, C.S. A.
b. Dec. 8, 1820 d. Sept. 1, 1863
Fallen in Defense of Home and Country
Resting Now in Patient Hope
Of Resurrection
Back in the place he was before, having come full circle, Ran knows the answers to his questions now, knows what it was for Harlan, once upon a time, to walk into this park, into the dappled light that fell through the old oaks, as it falls now, and find his name carved on the new stone in the plot; knows what it was like to come home from that Northern prison, after months and years of suffering and privation, to find his wife had grieved and buried him and moved on with her life.
And the sight of Shanté at her work, the woman he once loved, who once loved him, moving grave to grave, observing how the pieces fall, the fact that she would make these efforts of belief on his account, touches Ransom deeply, but in the way that watching Hope or Charlie play some imaginary game might do. As he envies them their childhood, so he envies her her faith, but Ran himself does not believe at all.
It comes home now that all of this—bathing in the herbs and washing down not up, walking to the crossroads, pitching the pot of water over his left shoulder not his right, and east not west, toward the rising sun…all this, Palo, hoodoo, Conjure, Congo practice, spirits, magic pots, all are forms of flight that Ransom took from something that he couldn’t stand to face, couldn’t stand to bear or bear to stand, something in himself. And what was it, the thing itself? It was his pain. It was the pain of human life. Somewhere Ransom had accepted, without ever knowing that he had, that he was too damaged, too afraid and weak, to bear that feeling in its raw and undiluted state, to hold it in his stomach and his chest, to bear it and still breathe, to bear it and still live, to hold it as he held the dying rooster, as he holds Charlie in the rocking chair at night, to hold it as he’d hold a dying child if there was nothing to be done except to gaze into his frightened eyes and be of comfort and stand what he must stand. But it is not a rooster, not a child that Ran is holding now. And when you awaken on that day, this day, when you experience the pain of being mortal, when you understand the dying animal, the dying child is you, that we are dying all the time, dying from the moment we are born, when you grasp that this is human life and it is all bound up with death—what then? What would you not do to escape? What price would you not pay to be spared? What drug would you not take?
It is that day now for Ransom Hill, and he has tried them all. He has fled through humor, wisecracks, affairs and feuds and busy-ness and business, through madness, music, alcohol, and art, even art, the place he’d tried hardest to be true…. And now the notion of a curse carried down the years inside an old black pot…All flight, evasion, fantasy. And why? Where had the break occurred? Where had he experienced the raw and undiluted thing, and opted out? Somewhere far back, far, far back, in childhood…an image of his father’s flying fists, of curling in a ball against the wall as blows rained down, of wanting not just them, but everything to end. Lying on the kitchen floor of that old shack in Bagtown, in the shadow of the great twin stacks, life, the core sensation, had become identified with pain for Ransom Hill, and he had wished that it might cease. How terrible and sad. And he has been in flight since then—how long has it been?
And the one thing that has never dawned on Ran till now, this moment, watching Shanté move among the graves, is that he might stop and turn around and take it on the chin. That he might hold the feeling in his stomach, in his chest, and yet still breathe, and yet still live, and bear now, as a man, what he could not bear then. Only now, today—which is that day, this day—does it occur to Ran not only that he might, but that he must. But sitting here on Harlan’s empty crypt, the thought that he might do so is like the moment when the addict’s eyes glaze and his head lolls back, when he tells himself that in the morning he will stop….
Even now, watching Shanté, his old friend, with love and total disbelief, Ransom, somewhere deep inside, is still waiting, hoping against hope for magic to attend, to redeem him and distract him from the burden of himself…. This is all there is. This is what life is, what it is right now, not what it was or will be, not what it might or should have been, only what it is right now, here in the graveyard, and no magic to attend. There is no escape from self, except death, and perhaps not even then…. Not even then…Only on the second pass does Ransom grasp that a
