Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans (24 page)

Nothing is as enduring as land, because it’s land, not water, that covers the whole earth. Beneath every pool of water—every stream, creek, marsh, lake, river, ocean—you go deep enough, you’ll find land. Water, always in motion, shifts and moves. Rivers dry or change their course, sometimes disappear. But land will always be. They say the world is mostly water, but what’s beneath all that water? Land. Earth. Way down deep, maybe, but it’s surely there. Land needs water, true, but without land, water knows no bounds. With land, you can make a life for yourself, be lifted up. Love it, tend it, take care of it, and it will take care of you.

Tall and slender like Moses, Jacob would roll his head back against his rocker squinting against the fierce Louisiana sun, a wooden pipe clenched between strong white teeth, his gaze spanning Silver Creek. He spread his long arms wide in an evangelical pose, his sing-song baritone thundering with conviction.

I’m tellin’ you, the Lord and the land will provide! You got you some good land, a strong back and two hands, you ain’t never got to go hungry, you can work that earth and beat it and tame it til it feeds you, you can eat every day God sends. You can hunt, you can fish, you can plow, you can plant.

You can live.

And Silver Creek provided. Through all the years of hard summer sun, spring floods, and the rare winter frost, the land gave selflessly, generously. Maree, a tiny but sturdy knot of a woman, would shell, clean, skin, or gut whatever the menfolk had netted, hooked, trapped, or shot, and with the treasured recipes learned at the knee of her grandmother Claudinette, turned her daughter Genevieve and her nephew Simon into masters of the kitchen. Through every turn of fortune the whole country endured, the Fortier table was never empty, and savory stews and soups and smoked meats and fruit pies overflowed from the cabin near the creek, and the aromas circling in the evening air mixed with the fragrance of the green, nurtured land.

As Jacob’s fortunes increased, he bought more land. And built himself a second house in New Orleans, just because he wanted to, and could. And burned his son Simon’s ear with the story of how the richest land in the whole parish became a tall, thick-browed black man’s land.

He felt a dryness in his throat, a thirst beyond any thirst before, as he remembered his father’s last days, and the promise he, Simon, had made to Jacob. A crying-out sound was trapped in his throat, but his mouth still would not work. He tried to lift his hand, but it would not move. He would just have to wait for the woman with the soft hands and the blues-song whisper. She would bring the water.

So he let his mind go where it chose.

Julian. Julian had not yet found him.

The land. It was all gone now. The house in New Orleans built with Jacob’s own hands. Gone, more than likely. That, he could live with; that, he could fix. But Silver Creek? He had tried to make Julian understand, if only for the sake of his unborn children, the grandchildren he would never see. But early on he’d seen a glow in his eyes, the same glow that rose in Jacob’s eyes whenever he’d spoken of Silver Creek. But in Julian’s eyes, that glow reflected the whole world beyond it.

But did it really matter? The end of the line had come, the end of him, the end of Silver Creek.He turned his head, and surprised at having the strength to do it, he relaxed his lips into a smile. It didn’t matter. His son, after all, had his own life to live, his own dreams. God bless him. He, Simon, had had his run, and it had been a good one.

W
hen Genevieve finished her story of the Fortiers and Silver Creek, Kevin folded his arms in front of him and bowed his head. Velmyra smiled, her eyes moist.

Julian leaned his elbows on his knees and rested his head between his palms, as if Genevieve’s story weighed so heavily in his mind it took both hands to hold it. If this was the story Simon had told him a million times in his kitchen while crawfish pies browned and bubbled in the oven and gumbo cackled on the stove, he hadn’t remembered it seeming so real.

Genevieve looked up at Julian, the light raking across her brows. She folded both hands in her lap resolutely and aimed a soft gaze at him.

“So baby, when you go trying to fix all this business with Silver Creek, think about your daddy, his daddy, and his daddy before. What the place meant to them. You got to know exactly what it is you fighting for.”

Julian inhaled deeply, then frowned. “Daddy told me some of the stories, but I don’t think I knew all of this before.”

“Oh, baby. You been told all this before.” Genevieve nodded, gave him a wizened look. “Ain’t nobody blaming you for forgetting, but you been told before.”

Either Genevieve had rendered the ancestors’ lives with a fullness he’d never realized before, or it was just that now he was willing to listen, not just hear. John Michel. Claudinette. Moses. What must their lives have been like? He half-remembered that John Michel, a white planter, loved the pretty-eyed, boot-black woman who had been his slave, and from them had come Moses, who had gotten the land intended for his brother. But none of these people had meant any more to him than characters in a book.

Even grandfather Jacob, who’d died when Simon was only sixteen, had been little more than myth to Julian. While he vaguely recalled something about Jacob and his trials with the land, none of the details sounded too familiar; he’d always listened with half an ear and an itinerant mind, wandering to thoughts of whatever he planned to do as soon as the storytelling was done. But in death, his father now resided in the realm of his ancestors—alongside John Michel, Claudinette, Moses and the others—and Julian had listened to the story with both ears and a full heart.

Julian was silent, lost in a memory. Back when he was small, four or five, he’d actually enjoyed those summers skipping across the yard, picking the bushes and trees clean of their sugary fruit, catching crawfish in the creek shallows for Simon and Genevieve to boil for supper. But Genevieve was right; as he grew older, things changed. He remembered being eleven or so and bored to distraction as Genevieve, his Auntie Maree and his father told the family stories, while all he could think of was the city where he lived.

He’d been a young musician in love with the sound of his own horn. New Orleans had been a street party begging him to join in and cut a step, and when its two/four time clicked in with the rhythm of his pulse, he couldn’t tell where the city’s heartbeat left off and his began. Even at Silver Creek, the music lingering in his head, he would catch his foot tapping to a city groove. He had had no patience for a country backwater where the only night music was the swelling ring of cicadas and the reedy whine of wind through pines.

Julian blinked his eyes. These last couple of days, he’d begun to see how a place like this could crawl under your skin and get into your blood. Velmyra had been right; Silver Creek mornings were miracles, liquid sun spilling gold onto green earth like a primordial dream. Honeyed air sagging with a weight that seemed to settle the rhythms of the heart. Tall pines sheltering the secret and the eternal. A creek as timeless as memory itself. From Jean Michel to Simon, one hundred and fifty years of Fortier men crazy in love with a piece of land. They’d all known something from birth that he was just beginning to see.

Genevieve’s ladderback rocker squeaked against the floorboards of the porch as she got up.

“I’m a little hungry. Anybody else want a little something to eat?”

They ended up staying for an early supper. Fresh-made collard greens with smoked hamhocks and butter beans with sweet onions were staples in any kitchen where Genevieve cooked, even if it wasn’t her own, and she hummed as she bustled around the stove. In a cast iron skillet she poured a little fat, then batter for hot water cornbread. When the smell of the homemade Creole spice she’d used in the deep fried chicken began to scent the air, Genevieve laid out china on the dining room table, and her guests sat down and gorged themselves.

After supper, Genevieve’s first words after table-clearing seemed to come from nowhere. “Let’s go for a walk. I got something to show y’all.” And as if her voice had levitating powers, they all got up. The sky was still light, the breezes cooling, and nobody could think of a reason not to go. Besides, after a meal like that, it would be ungracious to refuse a hospitable old woman who cooked like a dream.

She grabbed her yellow straw sun hat, a hickory walking stick, and a green plaid shawl from the front closet and draped it around her thin shoulders, and laced on a pair of purple Adidas sneakers. “This way,” she said, stepping back out onto the porch and pointing the stick toward the afternoon sun. The west end of Pastor Jackson’s sixty acres butted against the northeast corner of the Silver Creek land, and what she wanted to show them was close enough to get there and back long before dark.

They struck out toward the descending sun where the pines near the horizon shielded them from its low slanting glare, and Julian kept his eyes on the leaf-and-twig-strewn path. This was no leisurely stroll through a cleared patch of flat earth; this was the woods, thick and deep. What had Genevieve called Julian? City boy? Well, they’d not walked more than fifteen minutes before his basketball jock knees began to ache, and his second stumble on a break in the earth had Velmyra reaching for his arm. A few weeks away from the gym, and he wasn’t sure he could keep pace with a seventy-something-year-old woman.

But these woods were amazing, like nothing he’d seen before, at least not since he was a child. The air ripe with pine, the silence almost sacred, broken only by leaf crackle beneath his feet or the sounds of birds whose names he didn’t know. Before long, the deep light of afternoon sun was so hidden by the spindly trees that it seemed the evening dark had already taken hold.

Genevieve and Kevin had taken the lead, Genevieve with a hand on her walking stick and an arm strung through Kevin’s, both occasionally laughing as Kevin’s tall frame leaned over now and then in her direction to hear her speak. They seemed lost in conversation, and every few minutes Genevieve would stop, turn around, and point, her voice intoning like a tour guide’s. “Now those three cypress trees over there—that’s where the school house used to be,” or “See beyond those pecans? That’s where the church used to be where I was christened.” And later, when they’d gotten closer to the creek, “Slave cabins. Right down that path.”

Vel’s gazed lingered in the direction of Genevieve’s last announcement. “Really? Are they still there?”

“No, baby. Burned down a long time ago.”

Julian had thought of apologizing to Vel for the inconvenience of the long hike—this wasn’t part of the deal—but was stopped by her contented smile and easy bouncing gait as she ambled alongside him, wide-eyed, hands dug into her shorts pockets when she wasn’t pointing out some sort of interesting bird or patch of wildflowers or tree or berry-laden shrub. She was, it appeared, enjoying herself. In fact, everyone was, he realized, as Genevieve’s and Kevin’s laughter mixed with the rustle of scraping branches and leaf against leaf in the light swirls of late afternoon breeze. If Genevieve was upset about any of the recent events—Simon’s disappearance, the whole land thing—she didn’t show it. Or maybe this was how she handled it: walking out her worries in the woods.

As they walked, patches of Genevieve’s and Kevin’s conversation came through: Genevieve was talking about the creek, which was not within sight, but faintly audible, if you kept real quiet, from this part of the land. The creek, she’d said, fed into a small river with an Indian name she couldn’t quite pronounce, which fed into another, which fed into the Mississippi, and on into the Gulf. He’d never thought about that before—how the smallest little thing can move along to become part of something bigger. Like a chain of lives that began long ago, one small life flowing into another, and another, and on and on, until a whole lineage is born.

Nearly a half hour had passed when Genevieve stopped and pointed her stick to a space between four live oak trees where stood a decrepit cabin of old, weathered wood.

The trees hovered over the house so close they seemed as one, their leaves and branches crowning the roof like the elaborate headdress of an African queen. Eaves sagged where birds had nested in them. The roof showed gaping holes, and dry vines splayed out like boney fingers as they trailed up along the clapboard sides. It was much older and smaller than Genevieve’s house but in a similar Creole style—the broad roof sloping down over the gallery, the thin wooden columns spaced a few feet apart, and the whole thing raised up on blocks of stone, allowing a foot of crawl space beneath it.

“This was Claudinette’s place, the only house still standing from back in those days,” Genevieve explained, according to the handed down stories, that Claudinette insisted her lover Jean Michel build her a place where they could meet on equal terms, a place of her own that was neither slave quarters—reminding her of her station—nor plantation house, reminding her of his.

They all stared in awe. The house and its sheltering trees had an organic quality to it, almost spooky, like something alive. It had the slightly withered look of something that should have crumbled into the earth long ago, but apart from its sagging eaves and the holes in the roof, stood stubbornly straight and tall, defiant against the ravages of time.