Echoes of a Distant Summer (44 page)

She arranged to meet some of King’s men in Algiers, across the river from New Orleans. Her dreams drove her forward. She took charge of the rescue effort. King had a number of good men working for him, trustworthy and fearless. Her determination to rescue King, manifested in her face and words, impressed all who came in contact with her. The men deferred to her forcefulness. There was a confidence and certainty about her that was reminiscent of King himself. She was a methodical and tireless worker in the achievement of her goal. Within two days she had developed a plan from the information available. The sheriff, Corlis Mack, a fat spider of a man, was still in the hospital recuperating from the amputation of his leg, which King had caused when he shot it off. Corlis Mack had delegated the responsibility of running his department to Captain LeGrande. The sheriff and his executive staff always met at the Lafayette Social Club. Serena got herself a job at the Lafayette and, due to some staff absences, had the opportunity to serve LeGrande.

This is the point where Serena released the details of her memory; like a school of fish from an overturned net, the specifics wiggled away into the encroaching darkness. She preferred the obscuring haze of time, preferred to let the curve of the earth block her sight. It was all too horrible to recount. Suffice it to say, she allowed LeGrande to force himself upon her, to violate her, all in order to discover where King was imprisoned. In the end it was one of the colored waiters who revealed that King was locked away in a basement room of the Lafayette. King and his friend were rescued, but many people died in the escape. She remembered the smell of blood, then immediately after that the smell of gasoline as King’s men doused the room where King and his friend had been imprisoned with the contents of five-gallon drums.

There was one memory she could not forget. After King had been carried out and LeGrande had been shackled to the wall in King’s very same chains, LeGrande began to beg for his life. King’s men had left the room to get more gasoline and lay fuses for the dynamite. LeGrande had babbled, panic in his eyes, babbled that he knew where the baby was. It was in an orphanage in southeast Texas. He pleaded that if she let him go, he would tell her exactly where it was. Serena nearly laughed in his face. The man did not know to whom he was speaking. As she raised her revolver and pulled the trigger, she remembered thinking, I let you rape me, but I will not let you do it to my family! She
emptied her gun into his chest, then watched as gasoline was dumped on his dead body. She had to kill him. She had to make sure he never told anyone else. She still had no intention of letting the ghost of another woman walk through her house on a daily basis. Serena had paid with her body for the right to bear all of King’s children. She never intended to ever mention the baby to him again. It was as dead a subject as LeGrande.

When Serena and King returned to Bodie Wells, Serena had thought that they could leave all the bad experiences behind them, that they could start anew, building their lives together. She tended King night and day while he recuperated and regained his strength. She understood intuitively that King would honor her sacrifice, that he would put aside his anger and resentment because she had risked her life on his behalf. His code of conduct would let him do no less. She slipped into a schedule of letting her staff open the store in the morning while she was tending to King. After several hours in the store she would return to check on her husband. She often spent the afternoon with him. She was happy and almost blissful until she discovered that she was pregnant with LeGrande’s child. She didn’t dare tell King. She thought she could get rid of the fetus without him knowing. Serena never doubted that King would hate his enemy’s child.

The five weeks of imprisonment had destroyed something inside of King. The mechanism that created smiles and laughter appeared irreversibly broken. There seemed no room for anything in his psyche but hatred. He was like a lantern in which the wick had been withdrawn down into the body of the lamp, so that it wouldn’t light, but nonetheless always had the potential to explode. Shortly after he had recuperated fully from his injuries, King went back to New Orleans. He said he would not return until the sheriff was in his grave. Serena used his absence as an opportunity to try and abort the baby. She nearly killed herself with the potions that she took. She was in a coma on the edge of death when King returned from his successful mission of murder.

LaValle Baddeaux Tremain was born premature, weak, and colicky. Once she had the child in her arms, Serena wondered what could have made her want to kill her own baby. How could she have tried to take the life of this gift from God? This sweet, little miraculous boy, how could she? There was a terrible weight on her heart. She felt great guilt because she thought the potions she had taken had adversely affected
her infant son. She was immediately overprotective and doting with him. The first few years were touch-and-go, and he was in need of her constant care. She was committed to tending his every need and she was to remain so throughout his life. She never trusted King to be fair or just with LaValle. Why should she expect King to react differently to LeGrande’s child than she had to Mamie’s spawn?

With the birth of Jacques Bordeaux Tremain, LaValle’s weakness became even more apparent. Jacques, better known as Jack, was rough-and-tumble from the moment he was born. He was his father’s son and King took him everywhere with him. Lavalle was always more thin-skinned and cried more easily than his younger brother. Serena blamed herself for his weakness; he was her firstborn, a child who clung on to life despite his mother’s depredations. He came into the world needing more care than his younger brother.

It was predestined that Lavalle would be jealous of Jack, for Jack was everything he was not. Jack had a likeable manner and made friends without difficulty. He was good with animals, had the patience of a hunter, the steadiness of a person far beyond his years, and most of all he was fearless. LaValle could never compare. He was always the odd man out and often remained on the sidelines while his younger brother was chosen for games. He suffered the further indignity of being one of those unfortunate people who could not disguise his true feelings or intentions. It was obvious to all that he treated Jack unfairly, but Jack, to his credit, took all that LaValle dished out and kept moving on. The end result was that everyone disliked LaValle and loved Jack.

It pulled at her heart to see her oldest boy in such misery. She did everything she could to shelter him from the rancor of others and the unfairness of life, but she was unable to control the world in which he lived, and she hadn’t known then that his success depended upon his changing his reactions to that world. King was always suggesting to her that he take LaValle along on his trips with Jack. Serena never said yes to those suggestions. She didn’t trust King. At best he tolerated the boy. Jack was the child in whom King invested and Jack ate it up. He got tougher while LaValle stayed behind her skirts. Serena knew something was wrong, but she didn’t know what it was. There was very little laughter around her hearth, and joy seemed a thing of the past.

In 1927, when LaValle was five and Jack was three, Serena and King decided to move out to California. Serena went to New Orleans to see her sisters and pick up her fifteen-year-old brother, Amos, who had run
away from the family farm because of their father’s cruelty. King would only allow her to take LaValle; he took Jack with him to Oakland and found a house and set things up for her arrival. As fate would have it, LaValle developed a bad cough and it had the possibility of turning into something serious. Serena was concerned for him. Sister Bornais, a medicine woman, knocked on her hotel room door unsolicited late one night and gave LaValle potions that had him sleeping soundly for the first time in days. Serena was so thankful to see her tired, little son snoring in deep slumber she nearly wept. But to her misfortune, Serena learned that the medicine woman was not through with her.

Sister Bornais was known far and wide as a practitioner of voodoo. Her name, spoken anywhere in southern Louisiana, was mentioned with awe and respect. She was not a charlatan. She could read bones, tea leaves, palms, and faces. She was an expert on ghosts and haints. Her spells, potions, and cures continued to come with the highest recommendations. She was the one called in when the midwife had done all within her power and the doctor had thrown up his hands. Some people said she had the hands of God, others thought it was the devil’s gift, but none doubted her power. Yet Serena chose to disregard her advice.

It began when Sister Bornais took her hand. Sister Bornais’s yellow satin head tie seemed to reflect the lamplight and the numerous gleaming gold bangles on her wrists tinkled like the bells of a miniature carousel. She looked Serena directly in the eye and said: “You’s King’s wife, but this ain’t his son. I see from yo’ hand that King got two sons, but this chile here sho’ ain’t one of them. I see three boys, two related through their father and two related through their mother. The sign say that you and King only had one chile together.

“I didn’t ask for this, it come to me. I just see things, kinda ’round the corner; sometime it be days, sometime it be years; sometime it’s a vision, sometime it’s a feelin, and sometime I just know, like I been there and witnessed it. And with you, I is witnessing. I is tellin’ the buck-naked truth! There ain’t no mistake!

“What I see is this: If’en you want to help this here chile, you got to help his older brother. The problem with this here chile is there is a spirit that be hangin’ over him like a dark cloud. Only way to get rid of that spirit is to do right by the oldest. I’s beginnin’ to see it now. You got the power to change it all for the better, but for some reason you won’t.

“I got a clear vision of what’s gon’ happen if’en you don’t do right.
This here sleepin’ chile gon’ be a mama’s boy all his life, which ain’t gon be that long, really, and mo’ than that, he gon’ be the cause of death of his youngest brother. You don’t follow what I say, you gon’ be left with no sons at all! No chil’ren! King’s oldest boy gon’ be all right no matter what you do, he just won’t ever know his daddy. If’en you keeps to the path you’s travelin’, you ain’t gon’ have no chil’ren and the only decent grandchil’ren you gon’ have is gon’ hate you. You done messed with a powerful and vengeful spirit! That boy was s’posed to be with his daddy from the git. You done stuck yo’ finger in destiny’s business and less’n you right it, you’s got an unhappy life ahead. If you don’t take care of it right, I see unhappiness spreadin’ to yo’ family members, to yo’ sisters and yo’ brother; stopping yo’ kin’s seed from flourishing, makin’ you the only chile from yo’ family that bears chil’ren. You best take heed and pay the price to make that spirit move on! Do right by the oldest boy! I can’t say it no clearer. What will be will be.”

Intuitively, Serena knew exactly what Sister Bornais meant when she said “Do right by the oldest boy!” It meant take him into her home, the place where her own, younger children slept. On the way to California, Serena had made an effort to do right. She found the orphanage in southeastern Texas where the boy had been placed. She even stopped in Port Arthur and visited the orphanage. She had vague intentions of bringing the boy to San Francisco with her, yet when she saw King’s son she could not make herself take him into her home. She recognized the boy. He looked like his father. She felt an immediate fear for LaValle. He would lose his position as the oldest and then he would have nothing. He would be smothered by King’s two sons. He would be pushed even further to the periphery. She had to protect him from that. It wasn’t his fault that he was born into such a world. She determined that a voodoo woman’s words wouldn’t frighten her from doing the best thing for her oldest child. She left the orphanage without taking the boy, Elroy Fontenot, with her. Serena sent five hundred dollars a year to the orphanage from then on, hoping that would appease the evil spirit.

Over time it was revealed that everything Sister Bornais had predicted had come to pass. Serena was the only one of her siblings ever to have children. Her two sons were dead and in their graves before they were thirty and one grandson, the one most like King, did indeed hate her. Her family consisted of Franklin and his family. She had practically
no relationship with her granddaughter, Samantha, although Serena was beginning to talk with her great-grandson, Rhasan. He was the only great-grandchild who called her and came to visit her regularly. Her siblings in New Orleans would not speak with her. Her telegrams and letters were returned unanswered. After he was paralyzed, Amos had informed everyone that she had ignored Sister Bornais’s advice. She was not aware until years after the fact that Amos had known from the very beginning that she had failed to take the medicine woman’s advice. Now King was dead and Serena was doomed to live on into her fading years. It was totally unfair. He had more blood on his hands than she, yet he was allowed to escape the haunting memories, the feelings of dissatisfaction and regret, and the echoes of what might have been. The grand dream of Serena’s youth was in total carnage and she had been living in its wreckage for years. Her life was a husk, an empty shell, a casing that enclosed a seed that never germinated. She had longed to escape her origins, but after nearly eighty years of living she discovered she had brought all its meanness and sordidness with her. Her body might die in her huge, silent Victorian house on Fulton Street, but her essence would lie in one of those dank and dimly lit cabins that dotted the exhausted soil of the lowlands around Lake Pontchartrain.

Serena took a sip of her tea and discovered that it was cold. She rang the bell for Mrs. Marquez, then picked up the scented envelope. There was a contact number beneath the name and address. On the spur of the moment, Serena decided to call. She picked up the phone and dialed the number.

A woman’s voice answered after several rings. The soft, muted tones of a New Orleans drawl drifted across the wires. “Ford residence. May I help you?”