Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans (22 page)

They were in the parking lot about to get into their vehicles when Julian’s cell phone rang. It was Genevieve.

“Oh, sure, yeah. We were just talking about coming over to see you again anyway.”

He listened a minute, then said, “OK, sure, of course.” He folded the phone back into his pocket. Genevieve, he said, was delighted they were coming back over, and would they please stop by her house and bring something from her kitchen pantry?

“Umm, hmm. Don’t tell me. Let me guess.” Kevin got into his truck, rolled his window down, and leaned an elbow out.

Velmyra slung her purse over her shoulder as she got in the Neon. “Did you guys leave any of that stuff? You were hitting it pretty hard yesterday.”

“I sure hope so,” Julian said. “If not, we’ll have to go down one of these country roads and find the nearest moonshine still.”

When they arrived back at Pastor Jackson’s place in two vehicles, a full jug of white lightning in hand (Velmyra turned up a stash of three jugs on the pantry floor), they found Genevieve sitting in a white ladderback rocker on the porch, shading her eyes from the sun as they climbed the steps.

“Heard anything about Simon?” she asked.

Julian told her what the police officer had said, but added that they wouldn’t stop searching until they learned what happened to him.

Genevieve shook her head. “I been praying every day, every night since I talked to Simon. Praying he’s somewhere safe. Had the TV on all day, terrible. Just terrible. They’re talking now about those levees. Turns out they weren’t even made right. Can you believe it? I knew Simon should of got out.”

Julian took a deep breath. There was no point in telling her what he now believed about Simon’s fate. There would be a time for that later. “We’re doing our best to find him.”

“You know, he’s been through many a storm, him and Ladeena. You weren’t even born when Betsy came through. We thought that was the worst of it. But we never thought we’d ever see anything like this.”

Genevieve’s eyes glazed over as she seemed lost in thought. Abruptly, she turned to Kevin and Velmyra, still standing. “Lord, y’all forgive me. Come on inside. I just made a pitcher of iced tea.”

Julian thought about telling her about the gunshots, but decided against it. No use making her worry unless he was certain there was a reason. They sat around the huge dining table while Genevieve brought out a pitcher of tea from the kitchen and a cordless phone from a bedroom. Four phone calls yielded no answer, but at the fifth one Genevieve connected with a Miriam Longstetter, who was in her nineties, and a cousin of Genevieve’s mother, Maree. Yes, Miriam said, she had been contacted by a representative of a real estate development company who offered her $11,000 for her share of the Silver Creek land. She was old, and she had wanted money to leave to the grandniece who took care of her. Kevin took the phone and after introducing himself, explained what had happened to the whole property after she sold her portion. Once the woman understood, she became silent. “Oh, my Lord,” she finally said. “I would never have done something like that if I’da known what it meant. I just didn’t know.”

Kevin talked to the woman for more than a half hour. When he hung up, he folded both hands in his lap.

“We got our work cut out for us,” he said. “The woman is old. I could try to prove that she was feeble-minded or something, that she didn’t know what she was signing. That they deliberately misled her. But I don’t know, she seemed awfully sharp to me.”

She said she’d rarely thought about the land in Louisiana after living in California for sixty years and didn’t see any reason not to sell off her own small share of it. What harm could it do? And of course, no one explained how the sale of one portion could jeopardize the rest of the family’s ownership.

Kevin leaned back, stretched his legs under the table, and crossed his feet at the ankles. “These guys are smart. They love it when people don’t know the law. And if they can’t read—and some of these old folks can’t—even better. They pretty much can have things the way they want them.”

“So what do we do now?” Velmyra poured iced tea from the pitcher into her glass and stirred it with her spoon.

Kevin had asked the woman for a FedExed copy of the contract. He’d go over it for loopholes and errors, and study land dispute cases in the Parish to see if there were any grounds for a suit appealing the sale of the land.

Everyone was quiet a moment. “I just can’t believe it’s gone—the house, the creek, all of it.” Genevieve wrung her hands together. “We’ve always had this land. It’s been in our family forever.” She looked at Julian. “Baby, we got to get it back.”

Then she reached for the jug of white lightning Julian had placed on the sideboard and held it up. “Anybody care to join me?” She poured some of the clear liquid over her iced tea and shook the glass.

Julian, Kevin, and Velmyra looked at each other. “No, ma’am,” and “Thank you,” they all said.

Julian leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped. His head throbbed, and his eyes were strained and tired.
Enough for today,
he told himself. Fatigue draped his body like a leaden sheet, and he remembered how little sleep he’d had. Even though it was only late afternoon, the day had seemed endless. He looked at his watch. “I guess we better be getting back to Baton Rouge.”

As they got up to leave, Genevieve raised a hand.

“Wait, y’all,” she said. “ What’s your hurry? Pastor Jackson’s out visiting the sick and shut in—a few of the church members caught some awful bug. He’ll be a while, since they all missed communion last week. I could use a little company.”

They looked at each other, at their watches, and shrugged.

“Come on out on the porch,” she said, as if the decision to stay was never in question. “There’s usually a nice breeze coming through this time of day.”

Carrying the iced tea pitcher and all the glasses on a tray, Genevieve led them to the porch. Kevin and Velmyra sat in the ladderback rockers while Julian sat on the steps. Her eyes glassy, Genevieve sat in the green painted rocker and took a long drink of the spiked iced tea. She put the glass down on the wooden floor next to her chair, and leaned back with her hands folded across her lap.

“Whew!” she said, exhaling with a tired huff and fanning herself with a cardboard fan decorated with a picture of a blond Jesus, the words Elam C.M.E. written across the front.

“This reminds me of the old times.” She smoothed the wrinkles of her warmup pants with her hand, and smiled thoughtfully at Julian.

“Baby, I remember when you were nothing more than a little boy, coming up to Silver Creek in summer. When you were just a little thing, you couldn’t wait to get here. Your eyes lit up when you picked blackberries off the bushes and apples and peaches off the trees. You chased lightning bugs with those Beaulieu boys till it got so dark you couldn’t hardly see. You’d rip and run all day long in those woods if we’da let you. When the summer ended, you cried when you had to go back home.”

Julian looked down, smiled and nodded, then took a sip of tea. There was something resigned in Genevieve’s manner as she spoke. Something in her face, her manner told him there was a point to all this, a purpose to wanting him to stay.

Her words grew softer, yet more deliberate. “But I watched you, and I saw a change. Started in your eyes. The way they kinda dulled when you and your daddy and mama would pull up into the yard in that white Ford on the first Sunday in June. Saw it in your shoulders, too, drooping and sloping when we all sat on the porch at sunset, and you sat right where you’re sittin’ now, looking as bored as you could be. The last time I saw that look in your eyes and that slump in your shoulders, you musta been no more than eleven or twelve.”

“Your daddy was so proud of you. You strutted around with that horn of yours like it was the holy grail, and your mama asked you to play for us one evening after supper. You played “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” and had us all in tears. Remember how we made such a fuss over you? That was the only time you smiled the whole time you were here. I said to myself, ‘Umm, hmm, it’ll be a long time before I see my cousin’s young boy down here again.’”

Looking down at the yard dust on his shoes, Julian remembered that day, and how much he hadn’t wanted to come even then. The light on the porch grew dim as a cloud passed before the sun, then brightened again as the sun peeked through it. “That land? That creek? It meant everything to your daddy. But after a certain age, you got to be a real city boy.” She paused and heaved a slow, silent breath, looking across the yard at the grove of trees.

“I know you want to get the land back,” she said. “Cause you know how much your daddy loved it. But it’s harder, fighting for something
you
don’t love, something that don’t move your heart. So before you go trying to get the land back, it needs to mean something to you.”

“I’m so happy you came home,” she said. “You came home to where you were born, New Orleans, and now you’re here. But I need you to know something, and for that you need to go all the way home. Home to where your people came from, to where it all started.”

“Stay just a little while longer. I’ll fix you some food if you’re hungry. Cause I got a little story to tell you.”

H
ow long had he been here? A day? A year? He stared through closed eyelids toward beaming light. Was it the sun? It couldn’t be, for the surface where he lay was soft and cool and the place smelled of something pungent, like alcohol, or antiseptic. He tried to open his eyes to let in the stream of brightness, but as hard as he tried, his eyelids, dream-thick and heavy with sleep, would not part.

He drifted back into the dream, then again into a milky wakefulness, then into sleep again. He had no idea how long he had been in this place, but as he lay against the coolness, he couldn’t remember when he had last been anywhere else. His mind, it seemed, was a thing acting of its own will, a ship drifting into strange waters without a steering hand.

He was standing on a rooftop, looking over something resembling a river. Or a creek? He wasn’t sure. No, it had been a street. Only there was so much water (and so little street), more than he’d ever seen. Walking with a full sun beating against the back of his neck, throat gritty as sand, leaving heel tracks in roadside dust. Walking, walking. Hungry. Head feeling woozy. The sharp burn of sun and vibration in his feet as trucks screamed by.

Soft hands, softer voices. Women turning him over in bed.

He tried reaching a hand forward, but nothing moved. He tried to turn his head away from the light, but nothing moved.

Slowly, the name of his son gathered in his frail mind and he tried to call it out. But the word seemed trapped somewhere in his throat, fully formed in his mind, but resisting his tongue.

And then he slipped further back. Way back before his son was born, when he was a boy himself, before he’d ever heard of New Orleans. And another name came to mind. Again, he tried it out on his tongue, but it was like pulling a tooth from his mouth. His chest heaved as he tried to force the words from his lips. And finally the words came:
John Michel
.

Or as his father had always called him,
The Frenchman
.

A summer night at Silver Creek, damp jasmine-scented breezes ripple through sloping eaves. Like the ancient evenings buried deep in the memory of the live oaks, back before ropey moss hung from each branch like the beards of ancestors. His father Jacob, and Jacob’s sister Maree, seated on the narrow gallery of the cabin, tell the story yet another time.

His ears numbed to the telling of old folks’ tales, young Simon sits after supper on the cabin steps, restless; he’s heard the story a thousand times on these sultry nights while rocking chairs creak to the rhythm of cricket calls and nightbird songs from the woods. How his grandfather Moses’ mother, Claudinette, had found comfort and peace with the man who had given her the name Fortier, for he had loved her as well as any white man could love an Ashanti woman in 1855. Planter, part-time preacher, and master of thirteen slaves (including Claudinette), John Michel Fortier had truly grieved for his wife who’d died and left him with a single boy child, but not long after found salve for his sorrow with the dark-skinned beauty, laying his grief to rest in her heart.

Claudinette had been a cook without peer. The buttery scent of her biscuits and the savory aroma of her pot pies as she brought them into his kitchen didn’t hurt her appeal, but it was in Claudinette’s heart-shaped face that John Michel had seen treasures—the Louisiana sunrise in her eyes, the wide sweeps of Africa in the broad planes of her face. An abiding love for the woman he owned was something he could never admit (to himself or the world) until his mourning was complete, after his own wife was long buried.

And Claudinette grieved too, for her husband, a man with bullhard shoulders, powerful hands, and a generous but weak heart, who had left her in his sleep one September night with two brighteyed toddling daughters.

So when the grief clogging both their hearts had thinned to a fine stream of longing, John Michel came to Claudinette, removing his hat and bowing his head at her cabin door. He scuffed the Louisiana mud from his boots, the small rose in his hand nearly wilted from the August heat.