Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans (9 page)

And finally, how Julian, tiny, runt-like, sucking life through a tube, had pulled through against all the odds, his lungs and heart gathering breath and strength with each year, and in time, as sturdy as any child’s. And how years later he’d been given his greatest joy—a trumpet to breathe life into—to keep it that way.

The front door was even more swollen than before, and finally gave way with a few minutes of fist-pounding and a couple of body slams. Inside, the mighty stench had not subsided; its sharpness hit him full in the face, and seemed to have ripened with the recent days of dampness and heat.

He stepped over sludge-covered furniture and moldy objects tossed about and strewn across the floor—a coffee table of glass and chrome, a rolltop desk, two brass floor lamps, Simon’s record collection buckled and blackened over with slime, framed photographs and books, and Simon’s recliner chair—to get to the kitchen pantry, where the “hurricane box,” as his mother liked to call it, was kept.

The box of corrugated cardboard, where his father had kept the Bible since the last big storm, had completely fallen apart and had floated into the living room with nothing in it. The contents—the oil lamp, the radio, the flashlight, the dried rations—were covered in mud next to it.

But no Bible.

He checked the entire house—living room, kitchen, bedroom, bath, and even climbed into the attic. He wondered if it had simply disintegrated in all the water, but the leather covers would have survived. It was not here.

Which meant that Simon had taken it with him. And it dawned on him as clearly as the sun was inching downward in the western sky. He knew where his father was.

H
e got back in the car, started the engine, and drove toward Sylvia’s, feeling real relief for the first time in weeks. Resting his shoulders back against the car seat, he tapped his fingers on the steering wheel in time to a country and western song he didn’t recognize on AM radio, and whistled. Of course, Simon would be upset about the house, but Julian would explain how the insurance company had been giving him grief. It would take months. And even if Simon’s house could be restored, the neighborhood had no services—electricity, gas, even streetlights—and wouldn’t for a long time. The whole place was uninhabitable—his father would surely see that—and Simon would have no choice but to come home with him.

He turned the corner by the used-to-be wine and cheese shop to head to Sylvia’s neighborhood, and thought about how Simon had called New York, “not my cup of tea,” even though he’d never seen it. And though Julian had begged him to come up for a Christmas week or Thanksgiving weekend—
Let me show you
my
city—
he would hunch up his shoulders and hug his elbows, his skin bristling at the prospect. He was a country man. Tall buildings made him feel “as hemmed in as a pig in a closet.” Big crowds made him “nervous as a Betsy bug.” Julian argued—wasn’t Simon’s favorite spot to watch the Zulu floats on Mardi Gras Day the corner of Orleans and Claiborne, where a shoulder-to-shoulder throng always gathered, yelling, cheering, throbbing, and bobbing to the high school marching bands? “That’s different,” he’d said. “At Mardi Gras, everybody’s smiling.”

By the time he reached Sylvia’s sky-blue Creole cottage just off Magazine Street in Uptown, a plan had unfurled; he would leave the first thing in the morning, go get Simon, and take him to New York for a few weeks, or months, or as long as he would stay. He hoped his father had been eating well, and had remembered to grab his blood pressure medicine before he left. Whatever, Julian would deal with it, take care of it. He’d take care of it all.

A fallen tree in the yard, and a branch that broke a window; that was the extent of the storm damage Sylvia’s cottage had suffered. Along her block, paper trash lined the street, torn branches from the trees lined the gutters; otherwise, the house and the neighborhood looked as though nothing had happened.

As soon as he entered the noisy living room, he slipped into the liquid embrace of home and its familiar rhythm—around homefolks, his shoulders, his back, even his feet relaxed. The smothering hugs, the long, lilting vowels that seemed to liquefy in the heat, the uninhibited laughter, the kind eyes that searched others as though they truly cared, all warmed him like a bath. Around the room, as people sat or stood over paper plates buckling under barbecue chicken and beans and rice—some whispering and shaking their heads in corners, others grinning and laughing in doorways—the scene reminded him of a wake where humor and gloom abruptly traded turns; laughter might dissolve into tears, tears might bubble into laughter, all without warning.

The church members from Blessed Redeemer had known Julian from a child, and because they loved his father, loved him. Now, they’d all become a family of survivors; everyone here, he was sure, knew someone who knew someone who’d lost a house, a loved one, a life. Eyes strained with fatigue or stress, knotted foreheads and wringing hands bespoke their recent trials, but today was the day for the healing salves of food and mood—at least
they
had all made it through.

“Julian Fortier!” A sixtyish woman in orange striped jeans and a white T-shirt that read, “It Wasn’t the Hurricane, It Was the Levees” spotted Julian from the kitchen and squealed with delight. “Come and get you some of this food, baby!”

He smiled and held up a hand in the direction of the voice. The scent of barbecue was a welcome change from the acrid stench in the dead neighborhoods. He was hungry now; knowing Simon was safe had given him an appetite again.

It took minutes to get to the kitchen, as arms reaching out to hug him slowed his progress. Elaine Stout, a cherub-faced woman who lived up to her name (and who, his father once told him, had worn something red every day since 1997, when she won a $5,000 scratch-off lottery wearing a red dress) caught Julian in a doorway and pulled him into a lilac-scented bosom of scarlet polyester.

“How you doing, Miz Stout?”

She shook her head. “Oh, baby. It’s rough. Child, my house is
gone
. My whole
house
. I mean it just slid on down the street in all that water and fell apart! The whole neighborhood…it’s just…” Looking away, she took a deep breath and put her hand on her hip, still shaking her head, her voice quieter. “I’m still here, though. I didn’t lose nobody. I’m blessed. But baby, it’s rough.”

Her large brown eyes glazed over a moment as something snapped inside her. “I’m sorry, baby,” she said, embarrassed, her hand to her mouth. “I’m so sorry. I heard about your daddy.”

She put a hand to Julian’s cheek, and he felt a strong desire to reassure her.

“He’s OK,” he said. “I went to the house so I know he got out. And I know where he went. I’m going to pick him up tomorrow.”

Her face brightened. “Well, that’s good news! Where is he?”

But before he could answer, a deep baritone voice called him to another corner.

“Julian! Saw you on TV! What’s that Jay Leno like?’

And before he could answer that, others yelled out. “I caught your thing on Letterman. You played real good, baby!”

“The boy wasn’t on Letterman, it was Leno,” somebody else said.

“What you talking about? I got it on tape.”

“Then you got Leno on tape.”

“Julian, you bring your horn with you?”

For the next few minutes a crowd of four or five gathered around, assaulting him with affection; his back got slapped, shoulders squeezed, cheeks pinched, head rubbed. He was the made-it-big homeboy, back from the world stage, a welcome distraction from the woeful world of storms and floods.

Julian ducked his head and resorted to monosyllabic grunts, embarrassed. No one seemed to know that the Leno rerun was two years old, before everything had changed, and he wasn’t about to mention it. He grimaced at the reminder that he was not the player he once was, and might never be again.

On Sylvia’s green cotton slipcovered sofa, with paper plates balanced on their knees, sat two other church members he remembered well from his youth. Gideon Deslonde, a thin, retired carpenter with a mane of Afro-thick white hair, enjoyed local celebrity masking as a Mardi Gras Indian during carnival, and sitting next to him, Emma Zerra Pendleton, a willowy six-foottall jazz singer with an alto voice that occasionally dipped toward bass, was known to carry a black plastic urn with her—full of her deceased husband’s ashes—every where she went. Julian looked down at Emma Zerra’s purse near her feet, relieved to see no sign of Mr. Pendleton.

Spotting an escape from the adoring group, Julian squatted down near the sofa to talk to Mr. Deslonde, one of his father’s oldest friends, whose worn face seemed shaded in sadness.

“How you doing, Mr. Deslonde? You all right?”

Deslonde put the barbecued chicken leg back down on his paper plate. He took off his black baseball cap, scratched the back of his head, then put his hat back on and shrugged.

“No good,” he shook his head, sighing. “Lost it all. Lost my suit. Had to start all over again.”

Deslonde was not grieving over his house, safely upriver away from the levee breaches, but a loss nearly as heart-wrenching. His half-finished Mardi Gras Indian “suit,” an enormous costume festooned with wildly fanned plumage and thousands of colored beads in elaborate patterns, had been stored at a lady friend’s house in the Ninth Ward. The friend had survived, but the suit had not. Half of a twelve-month task of eye-straining needle-and-thread work (from the day after one Mardi Gras until the eve of the next), lost to the flood.

“I’m really sorry about that,” Julian said, and bowed his head. “I know it was pretty.”

“Aw baby.” Deslonde’s brows furrowed. “Pretty like you ain’t never seen.” He shrugged, took another bite of his chicken, wiped his mouth with a napkin, then looked up, eyes hopeful, glistening. “Started me a new one last week. Got me a whole five months ’til Mardi Gras. I’ma be ready! But it won’t be like it coulda been.”

Mardi Gras? Julian’s eyebrows flew up. The city was in ruins. Some were doubting whether there was enough of it left to call a city. Yet Deslonde, chief of the Red Feather Night Warriors tribe of the Mardi Gras Indian nation (a decades-old traditional homage to Native Americans who sheltered runaway blacks during slavery), was talking about the next Mardi Gras. But that was the way the city was, had always been—the biggest flood of the century was no match for the rolling tides of tradition. If the city was going to go down, it would go down fighting, with people like Deslonde on the front line of the battle.

“Hey, son. Where your daddy at?” Deslonde took a forkful of the red beans and rice on his plate.

Julian rose up from his squat and dusted his pants legs with his palms, reminded of his purpose. “Not far. I’m gonna pick him up tomorrow. Uh, can you excuse me a minute? I’ve got to find Sylvia.”

He patted Deslonde on the shoulder and went back to the kitchen.

The kitchen was noisy and cramped, as Sylvia and two other women bustled about, preparing food. Sylvia was pouring ice water into tall plastic cups from a large glass pitcher. Two other women from Blessed Redeemer, Vivienne Ponder and Lenessa Bishop, held casserole dishes covered in foil and were unveiling them—deviled eggs in one, Popeye’s chicken legs in the other.

Lenessa, a petite woman with her right arm in a sling (she’d sprained it being airlifted into a helicopter from her roof), used her good arm to put the platter of deviled eggs on the counter. “Hey Julian how you doin’ baby. Where you want these eggs to go, Sylvia?”

“You can put those in that big Corning Ware dish, and that white platter I set out,” Sylvia said, pointing to a counter top. She turned to Julian. “You made it! I’m glad you’re here, baby. I got something to tell you.”

But Julian didn’t hear those words. “Sylvia,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”

Vivienne and Lenessa took their dishes to the dining room, and Sylvia and Julian sat down at the kitchen dinette table near the back door, the fading window light dimming, while Julian poured out his theory about Simon.

When he was a boy, Julian’s fourth grade teacher had spent a whole class period talking about hurricanes, and for homework assigned them to make an emergency plan with their parents. Figure out a place outside the city, she’d said, where they could all meet if they were separated after a storm and couldn’t contact each other. Someplace they could all get to that was safely away from the storm.

Simon took two cups from the cupboard and turned off the percolator.

You can find me at Silver Creek.

Julian was nine. Silver Creek may as well have been on the moon.

That’s too far. How am I gonna get to Silver Creek?

Figure it out. Cause that’s where I’ll be. Something happens, I’m going back home.
Simon poured coffee from the pot into a white clay cup.

Come on, Daddy.

He put a teaspoonful of sugar in the coffee, tasted it, made a face, then put another teaspoon in. In Julian’s cup of hot milk, he poured a tablespoonful of coffee and two teaspoons of sugar.

I’m gonna get my daddy’s Bible and I’m gonna go to Silver Creek. Even if I have to walk there.

Julian contemplated his father walking along a stretch of barren road, a Bible tucked under his arm. He took a sip of the coffeeflavored milk, then looked up, confused.

What if I can’t find it?

Simon smiled, took a long, slow drink of coffee, and smacked his lips.
When the time comes, you’ll know,
he said. He looked down at the big eyes of his young son.

Cause it’s your land, too.

Shortly after that, the family had made their annual summer trek to Silver Creek and Simon had pointed out every bend, every turn, every tiny creek along the way. It was the trip Julian best remembered, because he had fought so hard not to go.

Sylvia frowned. “I thought you said you called Genevieve and she didn’t answer. And if he’s there, why hasn’t he called?”

“Daddy never could remember my cell phone number. And I don’t know why Cousin G didn’t answer. Maybe they got some storm damage up that way too. Whatever, that’s where Daddy is, I’m telling you. Daddy walked to Silver Creek. Or hitched, or talked somebody into driving him there, or something.”