Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans (25 page)

“What’s that?” Velmyra pointed to a wrought iron chair the size of a small loveseat on the west side of the house, rusted and slightly tilted on lopsided earth, but wholly intact. In the middle of the back was a swirl of iron ornately curled into the letter “C.”

“He went down to New Orleans, my great grandfather did, found the best colored blacksmith in town, and had that seat made for her to sit and rest her feet under the trees after a long day of standing in his kitchen. Or at least, that’s what my grandmother told me.” Genevieve looked up at the house. “Not too fancy, but you see it’s still here.” she added. “Built it himself. This is the house where Moses was born.”

She looked at Julian. “And your grandfather Jacob, too.”

Julian ran his hand along the side of one of the wooden posts, thinking about the unlikely pairing of his great-great grandfather and grandmother, secreted away in a love nest in the woods. And as much as Simon had talked about the family, Jacob was a man he knew little about. He knew his grandfather had died fairly young, suffering a long sickness, but Simon rarely mentioned his father’s last years.

“How did my grandfather die? Daddy never talked about it much.”

Genevieve leaned on the hickory stick. A breeze rose up from the floor of the woods, swirling in air cooled by a slipping sun and the shade of pines and oaks. She pulled her shawl around her shoulders.

“Well now, I’ll tell you what I know.”

After John Michel died, she said, white men had simply seen Moses as a black man stewarding his dead white master’s land, and pretty much let him be. Not so with Jacob. He was a black man tending his own land, the best land in the parish, and he was living well. That had been his crime.

“Then that boll weevil came along. Ate up everybody’s cotton crop for miles around, but not Jacob’s!” Genevieve threw her head back and let out a cackling laugh. The deadly pest tore through the southern states, destroying acres of crop and bringing cotton farmers to their knees. “Yessir, that boll weevil knocked King Cotton on his sorry butt! But it never had a taste for Jacob’s crop. Folks couldn’t figure it out, how Jake got so lucky. Some said it was God’s miracle, some said Jacob had the devil on his side. Then the Depression came. Jacob had food on the table all the time, when everybody else—white farmers, mind you—was going hungry.”

Genevieve sucked her teeth. “I tell you, jealousy is one powerful force. I mean, they treated him something terrible. Night riders. Klan. You name it. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another.”

Genevieve looked toward the distant trees and squinted at the sun. Jacob’s wife, Liza, she said, died young, giving birth to her second child, who also didn’t live. And it was not long afterward the fires started: first the barn, then the shed. They weren’t accidents, she believed, but acts of spite. “That just about did him in; seemed like he didn’t have no more fight left.”

“He took to his bed for a long time. Just couldn’t get up, too weak. Doctors said it was his heart, but we all knew what it was. It was his heart all right—heart
break.
Heart
sick
ness. Worry. Nowadays they woulda called it stress.”

“Simon wasn’t much more than a boy, but he took over, did most of the work. After my own daddy died, it was just us, my mother Maree, Uncle Jake, me, and Simon. My mother took care of Uncle Jake and looked after Simon too, ‘til he got old enough to take care of himself.

“But Uncle Jake still ran everything from his sickbed. Funny thing. Uncle Jake never lost his appetite, loved good food. Loved my mama’s red beans and rice ‘til the day he died. I always thought Simon let Mama teach him how to cook just so he could have something to give his daddy every day. A sweet biscuit rubbed with butter. A bowl of red beans. Something to bring a smile to his face.”

Julian smiled. “That sounds like Daddy.”

Genevieve nodded. “Before he died, he made Simon promise to keep the land in the family, whatever it took. Said if the land ever left the family, get this, said he’d come back from the grave
himself
to make things right. From the
grave
. Well, that got Simon’s attention. Simon said he would, but he was just a boy, you know, sixteen years old.”

Pulling her shawl closer, she turned to look toward the creek. “There’s nothing harder to hold on to than a good piece of prime land, or at least that’s the way it seems these days. Rich folks always seem to find a way to get it, poor folks always manage to find a way to lose it. Every three or four years, some slick fast-talking somebody tried to get me and Simon to sell. They just wouldn’t quit. Now…” She shook her head. “Look like they found a way.”

She pointed her hickory stick toward the north end of the woods. “There’s a new golf course less than four miles that way with a big ol’ concrete parking lot. Right where there used to be a thick forest of pines and pecans and sweetgum. And they put up a strip mall two miles away from that.”

She looked at Julian. “Things change, I know. Your daddy saw how things were changing. Plus, he was no farmer, he was a cook to his heart. Farming just wasn’t what it used to be anyway—got harder and harder to make a living. Then, you know, he went off to Korea to fight.”

Julian raised an eybrow. “You mean, to cook.”

Genevieve smiled. “I guess you’re right. He mighta used that gun they gave him once or twice—to kill a rabbit for the cooking pot! But he was real proud of how he kept those soldiers going with my mama’s recipes. When he came back, he went straight to New Orleans. Jacob had built that Treme house, but after he got sick, he stopped going, so Simon just moved in. He got himself a good job, cooking the best food in town. Met Ladeena down there, even though she was from these parts. Had you. Things were going real well for him down in New Orleans. But his heart was really right here, at Silver Creek. That’s why he wanted you to have this place, Julian. He wanted the things he most loved to be together.”

Julian nodded, his voice quiet. “Yeah. I get that.”

On the walk back to Pastor Jackson’s house Velmyra spotted a wild bush of plump blackberries—still thriving six weeks after the normal season—and stopped to pick them, then carried them in the broad, flat leaves Kevin had picked from a banana tree just behind Claudinette’s cabin. The air, cooler now, carried a faint breeze from the nearby creek and the cicadas were beginning their evening song.

Exhausted, too tired to hold his mind in one place, Julian let it drift with the prevailing breeze, back to when he was a boy. He half-remembered, half-imagined lightning bugs as golden flecks against the dusk, foot races in these woods, barbecue cookouts and fish fries, and sleeping out on the porch under the night-lights of a million summer stars. Then he imagined his father, years before, doing the same thing, and his father before him, and on back to Moses and John Paul.

What had Simon told him years ago?
A man is really what he leaves behind when he is gone.
His footprint on a piece of land, his smile etched on the face of a child. For years Julian thought Simon was imposing Silver Creek on him, the burden of a gift he didn’t really want. But the gift really had been Julian’s to give to his father—to steward his father’s treasure, to be caretaker of what he would leave behind. His memories, his history, his home. The things that mattered, the things that proved he was here.

By the time they got back to Pastor Jackson’s, the flaming sun had descended halfway down the trunks of the slender pines nearer the road, and the sandy yard was awash in a long slant of afternoon light. The Pastor’s car sat in the yard, and from the living room floated the stereo bass of rhythm and blues. Genevieve walked up the steps and stood on the porch, her hands on both hips.

“Thank y’all. That walk did me some good,” she said. “Simon and I used to walk those woods all the time. I felt close to him out there.”

She waved and turned to walk back into the house, then turned back again. “Your daddy’s all right, Julian,” she said. “He’s either being looked after by all the ancestors, or he’s one of ’em now. Either way, I’m all right with it. You will be too.”

They drove back to Genevieve’s cabin to check on it; nothing had changed. The place looked untouched and the gunshot incident had receded so far back in Julian’s memory he could hardly believed it had happened. Standing in front of Kevin’s truck and viewing the cabin from the distance, Julian saw something he’d never seen before. Crudely etched in one of the stacks of cinderblocks on which the cabin sat, written in the awkward hand of the old or barely literate, were the words “Jacob Fortier, 1925.” A handmade house, built brick by brick and board by board with his grandfather’s hands. He’d never met the man, but here was indelible proof of his life.

“I like your cousin Genevieve, she’s real sweet.” Kevin opened the door to his pickup, then reached out his hand to shake Julian’s. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, soon’s I know something.”

Julian pulled him in to his chest for a quick hug and slap on the back.

“Can’t thank you enough, man,” he said.

Kevin’s face gave way to a blushing, boyish grin. “You can thank me when we get your land back for you.”

“Well, even if we don’t—”

“We will, man.”

So with the afternoon light elongating the shadows of pines, he steered the Neon toward the highway beneath a chalk-blue sky, and Velmyra, chin resting on her cupped hand, stared thoughtfully at the blur of trees and shrub through the window. Flashes of evergreen and thick brush now and then blanked out the dying sun, while the groan of engine noise coated the air.

His head heavy with deferred sleep, Julian remembered something his father would say after a particularly busy shift at Parmenter’s restaurant stove—
It’s been a long week tonight.
The morning had begun, it seemed, before the previous night was done. The early shock of gunshots puncturing the delicate bubble of romance seemed forever ago, and now faded like the mist-veil of the October moon that had ushered in the morning’s sun.

They rode in uneasy silence until Velmyra’s cell phone rang.

“I’m fine, Mama, you OK? I know, I know. Yeah, we’re on our way. We should be there in another hour or so. Yeah, OK. Me, too,” she spoke into the phone.

More silence, before Julian spoke.

“If it’s OK with you, I’d like to make one stop before we go.”

He pulled the car onto the narrow, rocky footpath alongside the cemetery, with its cattails and dandelions that towered above the leaning headstones, some so old they seemed to rise out of the ground like ancient markers of a past civilization. Julian stared at the field a moment before he turned to Velmyra.

“Just give me a minute, OK? Then we’ll get you to your folks.”

She smiled. “Take your time.”

The bramble and grasses were high and wet as he tramped through them, making his way to the Fortier family markers. The flowers he’d set by his mother’s stone were, to his great surprise, still fresh-looking, glistening in the late sun and watered with dew. He walked further until he came to the oldest section with the smallest, crudest-looking stones. He searched until he found the ones he was looking for.

JOHN MICHEL FORTIER b—1810, d—

He couldn’t make out the date of death, but walked further until he saw other markers, MILDRED, BELOVED WIFE, gouged into the rough stone in crude script, and MOSES, the simple word carved into a ruggedly cut stone slab eroded by wind and water, and faded by a century of sun. And one simply bore the word CLAUDINETTE.

There were others he didn’t even notice when he’d been there before, or if he’d seen them, their meaninglessness at the time had rendered them invisible. Clothilde had been laid next to her husband, and he found Belle, but not Patrice. They’d all lived here together back then, one big close-knit family, wagons circled against the blustery winds of a sometimes unkindly world.

There was one name he knew he wouldn’t find, but his eyes searched anyway. The one who drank, caroused, and played his bugle all day while his black half-brother, Moses, rose with the sun to plow the land. The one who escaped a cuckolded husband’s bullet by fleeing, never to be seen again, leaving his own Silver Creek acres to languish.

Julian couldn’t help but flinch when Genevieve told John Paul’s part of the story. A bugler, a musician. It almost seemed too coincidental to be true. Had he, Julian, become that man generations later, turning
his
back on the land that was his birthright?

He searched the stones for the one he really came to find, and he was just about to give up when his foot nearly tripped over it. It was small with rounded corners, almost black with dirt, but the etched name glinted boldly in the sun, as if some cosmic spotlight bathed it in revelatory light.

Jacob Fortier. Long dead before he’d been born. But Julian vaguely remembered something about the promise Simon had made to his father, and his father’s rueful reply that hung as heavy and redolent in his memory as overripe fruit on a low branch. What had Genevieve said?
To make things right, he’d come back from the grave.

Never one to put stock into this whole spirit business for which his hometown was so well known, Julian allowed himself, this one time, a desperate man’s indulgence. He looked around to see if anyone was looking. The car was too far away for Velmyra to see him, and there was no one else in sight.