Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans (2 page)

Simon had flicked away that chill, gave it no more thought. News folk and politicians had a way of exaggerating these things. But the fact that so many around him were leaving this time did make him swallow hard, scratch the back of his head. He’d never seen such a rush of cars lined up to the corner, crowded to the rooflines with boxes and bags. But like he told Raymond LeDoux down at the Field’s Grocery, he hadn’t left for Betsy and he wasn’t leaving now. The vandals and looters would have to move on to another house for their business. Besides, he was a Fortier, and a Fortier did not leave his home to the whims of storms and thieves.

A car horn toots, the rattling complaint of a well-used Toyota Camry announcing Sylvia’s arrival. She must have changed her mind. Simon’s face breaks into a wide grin. Maybe there’d be company for this storm night after all.

Simon calls out as Sylvia parks along his front fence, “Just in time. Red beans’ll be ready in about twenty minutes.”

My, my. Looking good today, but didn’t she always? Sylvia McConnell, wearing her sixty-eight years gently, stylishly, steps out in green Capri pants and a yellow cotton top, leans her backside against the doors, slender arms folded across her chest and ankles crossed. A scarf of light blue silk tied under her chin stands between her freshly curled and dyed hair and the capricious winds of Louisiana summer. Even now, Simon notes, even in retreat from a hurricane, she found time to keep her standing appointment at Miss Lou’s.

“My sister and them called from Shreveport. The brother-in-law is bringing his mama, but they still got extra room if I need to bring somebody else.”

A divorced English teacher from Wheatley High and old acquaintance of Simon’s and Ladeena’s from Blessed Redeemer Congregational, Sylvia reveled in the freedom of retirement, spending most of her days playing bridge, singing high soprano in the gospel choir, occasionally watching Simon cook, and listening to his animated diatribes on his life’s loves—cooking, his talented and smart-as-a-whip son, Julian, and a perfect piece of land called Silver Creek.

A year after Ladeena died, when the shine of his grief had dulled, Simon’s padlocked world had unlatched to invite Sylvia in. Time had tamed the rough edges of mourning and Simon needed a new comfort—the living, breathing kind.

On a Wednesday morning, when his car battery failed and he had no way to prayer meeting, he remembered last Sunday, the high soprano floating above all the others in “Lead Me, Guide Me
.
” Sister McConnell gave him a ride and, in time, a reason to dream again. She was funny, spirited like Ladeena, with a twist of sass. She could cook up a mean etouffee (though not as good as his) and whenever his spirits darkened, there was that laugh that could soften a man’s heart and make his blues disappear like swamp mist beneath a full sun.

In the years since they began keeping company, time, friendship and a mutual understanding had distilled their conversations into shorthand: glances replaced whole paragraphs, sentences rolled out unspoken in a raised hand, a turned head.

He recognizes Sylvia’s look now—raised eyebrows, mouth twisted—and shoots up a hand to ward off the argument brewing in those eyes.

“Now don’t even start. I already told you what I’m doin’.”

Shaking her head, she turns to look up at the sky as a heavy gust sweeps through the trees.

“Don’t be a fool, Simon. You need to get out of this place.”

And for the next three minutes straight, she rails on about his foolishness.
The storm will be the worst ever! Everybody with four wheels and half a brain is leavin!
And so on.

When she sees his eyes shut down, the thick-bunched veins in his temple twitch, and his mouth clamp tight, she recognizes her cue to stop. For a moment, they look at each other in unyielding silence. Sylvia’s glance falls to Simon’s khaki pants, where the tree branch has left a swath of dirt.

“What happened to you?”

Looking down, Simon scrapes his thumbnail at the L-shaped mark. “Aw, damn oak. Lost a branch.”

Sylvia sighs. “Ummm hmmm, see there. Already.” She sucks her teeth. “Somebody trying to tell you something.”

Ignoring the fact that he’d had the same thought only a few minutes ago, he turns to walk into the house. “Drive careful. They already talking about traffic backed up. You’d better get on your way if you going.”

For all his testiness, it might have been her bossy strain, her spitfire nature that had kept him interested; it was as if Ladeena had left a little bit of herself in this woman to watch after him, remind him when he was being careless. He’d liked that—being looked after, being cared for. Even when he didn’t listen, even when he stiffened his shoulders against the headwind of her complaints.

At the steps he turns back to her, his tone kinder. “I’ll save you some of my andouille. You not going to believe how good these beans are. Best pot I ever made.”

A feathery breeze ruffles her scarf as she pulls it closer. “Does that pot float? You best put those beans in some Tupperware. Eat well, baby, cause you’ll need your strength in case you have to swim.”

He ignores that, too. “Sure you don’t want to stay? I’ll make it worth your while.” He winks.

Laughing, she shakes her head again. “Simon Fortier. I’ll be praying for your sorry butt in my sister’s dry house.” She gets in the car and leans an elbow out the window.

“By the way, you might as well know, I stopped by because Julian called me, asked me to check on you. He said you all had some words. Did he call back?”

Simon’s skin prickles. Two weeks since their blowup over Parmenter and still their words stumbled broken and bruised into the growing gulf between them. And yesterday, when his son had called from New York, told him to stop acting like “a crazy old fool” (even offered him a plane ticket), a slow dirge of hurt still played in Simon’s head. He’d quietly hung up the phone in the middle of Julian’s rant. Sometimes, Simon swore, all that fame business had gotten to that boy’s head, made him forget who the daddy was in this deal.

He, Simon, never would have treated his own daddy that way, lest the back of a hand land upside his head. Nor would his father have treated
his
father like that. The Fortier men were of the nononsense breed. Simon’s daddy had built this house with his two rock-hard hands seventy-eight years ago and would have thought nothing of using one of them to take down a too-grown son with a runaway mouth.

World-famous trumpet player or not. Julian ought to show more respect.

“No. Julian ain’t called.” Simon puts his hands in his pockets, and looks up at the ruffled sky. “Not since yesterday.”

Sylvia starts the engine. “Well, you know the boy had a point.”

Simon doesn’t know whether she’s talking about Julian’s anger at him for not leaving before the storm or for that business with Matthew Parmenter, the latest item on a list of painful issues that divided father and son like prickly thorns, and which was really none of Julian’s business anyway.

Either way, he’s heard enough.

“I got to check on my pot.” Simon says.

“Did you get your blood pressure prescription filled?”

Simon laughs. “Woman, leave me be! If I die, just carry me on up to Silver Creek! Dump me under that magnolia tree next to Ladeena.”

“Right.” Sylvia rolls her eyes. “You and Silver Creek. Why don’t you just go on back there to live? Then you can be
her
problem for the rest of eternity.”

She has often asked him that about Silver Creek. And he blows it off with a laugh, and changes the subject. He’s never fallen out of love with his boyhood home. But leave the city where he’s spent most of his life? Abandon the house built with his father’s own sweat and muscle, the place where he’s spent forty years with Ladeena, to return to the piece of land he grew up on? It’s complicated.

“Been thinkin’ about it.” Simon strokes his chin, narrows his eyes into a sly squint. “But then who’d be here to meddle you?”

She laughs a little, furrows her perfectly arched brows. “Stay well, Simon. Be careful.”

He walks over to her car, leans in to her window to plant a kiss on her cheek. She places her hand softly on the back of his neck.

“I worry about you, silly man.”

He smiles through twinkling eyes. “Don’t. I’ma be fine.”

She pulls away and waves and he lets out a little chuckle as the front wheel tips slightly over the curb. He watches the Toyota sputter away and reminds himself that when she returns, he needs to get her muffler fixed.

“Take care, sweet lady,” he says after her, in a voice she couldn’t possibly hear.

With the air closing in, the deep silver clouds hardened to a steely dome and the wind began to swirl with the oncoming rain.
It’s beginning.
Simon closed the window blinds in the kitchen and turned his thoughts to supper. He could tell by the aroma that the red beans were done. He filled his plate with rice, ladled the beans on top, and sat down at the glass table in the dining room. He pushed his chair back a little from the table and spread a napkin in his lap, and took a bite of the sausage. He was right. This was as good as anything Auntie Maree had ever made, rest her soul; the andouille sausages spiced and tender, the rice all flaky perfection, the garlic and fresh herbs blended flawlessly. Nothing took his mind off a storm like a plate of his own good cooking.

When Ladeena was alive, they’d had a ritual on these nights of big storms. Filling the kitchen air with aromas—pots or pans of etouffee, gumbo, crawfish bisque—a sure-fire distraction from the hollering winds. Reading parts of the New Testament out loud, and later, as the Gulf churned, the river rose, and watery wind gusted through the eaves, huddling between the freshly ironed sheets holding each other so tight no woman-named storm could pry them apart. Making love as if it were their last night on earth, as well it could have been.

It was during the storm nights that he most missed Ladeena. With her gone and Julian having left town years ago to, as Simon put it, “go off and get famous,” Simon’s life had changed. It didn’t seem so long ago that he’d been a busy family man with a wife, a young son, and a job as head chef at the place his best friend and employer, Matthew Parmenter, had billed the “Finest in French Quarter Dining.” Now, his starched, monogrammed uniforms and pleated white toques gathered dust in the closet where he’d stored them ages ago. Each long day resembled the one before, and while he could have been a lonely man, Simon figured he had a choice in the matter. He chose not to be.

Each morning whenever the sun blazed through his kitchen blinds, after a breakfast of chicory coffee, eggs, and toast, he walked the neighborhood, up and down the street with his prized possession, the African cane of hand-carved ebony Julian had brought back from a concert tour in West Africa. Along the five-block circle to Field’s Grocery and around the school yard and the Mount Zion Baptist Church, neighbors leaned across porch banisters to wave, or slowed their cars to crawling to shout a greeting—
How you feeling, Mr. For—tee—aay!
and Simon nodded, gently touching the brim of his straw gardener’s hat, and shouted back,
Woke up this mornin’, so I ain’t complainin’.”

Friends chided him for daring to walk in a neighborhood that, though once safe, now had been all but taken over by young boys with a loathsome skulk in their walk and hooded, futureless eyes. Boys that had “the devil all up in them,” as the church folks said, with their drugs and guns. And that wasn’t the only way the neighborhood had changed; the tight-knit black community, so rich in history, had been broken in two by the wrecking ball. It had been almost forty years, but he still longed for the old days when the neighborhood was whole, before they’d built the awful freeway that sliced through his beloved Treme like a surgeon’s amputating knife. Before the shade of the majestic live oaks, perfect for parade watching, gave way to the shadows of a concrete overpass.

Simon walked anyway, head high, defiant, never mind the freeway shadows and the glaze-eyed boys. He used the cane to steady his feet, but if need be, he could swing it like a cutlass. This was
his
neighborhood. He reclaimed it with each stubborn tap of his cane, and nobody—not street thugs nor the thieving city planners—was going to take it away.

After his daily walk, Simon sat with a tray of lunch watching
The Young and the Restless,
then puttered in his garden, fussing over his bougainvillea, hibiscus, and herbs. As early as Tuesday he’d begin plans for the following Monday—red beans and dominoes night. Some Sundays after church, if the sun was shining and he had the urge for conversation, he would put on his red tie and brown straw hat and take the St. Claude bus along Rampart Street to Canal, and then board the streetcar that would take him to St. Charles Avenue.

While the car rattled along past the old mansions and lavish lawns of juniper grass, he would sit near the window that held the best view of the live oaks and cypress trees, and watch the lean young bodies jog past Audubon Park. If he rode long enough, there would always be a tourist or two with an appetite for local flavor, and Simon would oblige with a must-do list that would rival the Chamber of Commerce’s glossiest brochure.
What kind of music you like? Jazz? Zydeco? Rhythm and blues? You like barbecued shrimp? OK. Here’s where you go…

If the tourists were a young romantic couple, he’d suggest a place where the lights were dim enough to hide an affectionate fondle—didn’t matter so much about the food. But if they were older, more particular, he’d recite his A-list, varying it according to the tourists’ station and style. A well-heeled couple—a woman with facelift skin and a Louis Vuitton bag, her hand draped on the arm of a silver fox shod in Italian loafers—could handle Commander’s Palace or Galatoire’s and not blink at the bill. A pair of twentysomethings in faded jeans and backpacks…well, he’d send them over to Willie Mae’s or Dunbar’s for “some juicy fried chicken that would make you wanna slap your mama.”

He would warn them, of course, that none of the places were as good as ol’ Parmenter’s, where he’d been head chef for more than forty years.
I was famous for my red beans and rice, don’t cha know. Couldn’t nobody touch me. I tell you something, when that place closed, New Orleans cooking lost a step!
And as Simon waxed on—about a neighborhood so old it had seen African slaves in Congo Square, dancing
bamboula
rhythms and stomping out the blueprint for jazz; about the Mardi Gras Indians with their wildly feathered and beaded “suits;” about the music, and of course, the famous food—the wide-eyed young or aging couple hung on the master chef’s every word. When they stepped off the streetcar into the sunlight and looked back at him with their phone cameras poised, he knew he’d given them what they wanted: a souvenir, an elbow-brush with authenticity. Long ago, he’d not only accepted his role as tourist memento, he’d come to relish it. He, Simon Fortier, was better than any postcard they could mail home to their friends. He offered up the soul of the city itself.