Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans (40 page)

They walked a mile or so along the creek, then took off their shoes and waded in the clear shallows along the bank. They skipped rocks across the water, and stopped to study a heron basking in the sun on a floating branch, and tried to coax a turtle out of its shell with a stick. They wiped sweat from their faces with their sleeves, and, sitting on a rock, turned their faces to the sky to let the warming light of the sun glaze over their closed eyelids.

They did nothing at all for almost an hour. And when they returned from the creek, they inhaled the rich, spicy aroma of red beans that had wafted out to the yard and beyond.

The others were still sitting on the porch, this time their laps holding Genevieve’s good china plates nearly running over with beans, rice, and andouille sausage, tumblers of sweet tea sitting on the floorboards next to their chairs. Julian and Velmyra piled their plates, pulled chairs from the kitchen onto the porch, and sat next to them.

The air was still. Except for the chirping of birds, the occasional rustling of the high grasses, and the rare breeze stirring the cypress and pecan trees, there was no sound as they all ate; as usual, eating a meal prepared by Simon Fortier was not to be interrupted with conversation.

But after the last fork was laid down, Pastor Jackson sat back, loosened his belt, and the usually quiet man issued a rare declaration: “When I die, I hope St. Peter meets me at the gate with a plate of red beans as good as these, Simon.”

Kevin raised his glass and said, “Hear, hear.”

Not looking up from his plate, Simon grunted. “St. Peter don’t have my recipe,” he said. “And he ain’t getting it.”

The laughter that followed, only mildly laced with liquor, was light-hearted and free-flowing. All were making an effort to keep the mood light and their spirits high, despite the veil of gloom that surrounded what was likely the end of their time at Silver Creek.

Pastor Jackson asked Simon about his journey through the storm, having missed the telling earlier. Simon decided to tell him the shorter version. He reached down to the floor and held up his Bible.

“This book goes back to my great-granddaddy, more than a hundred and fifty years ago,” he said. “My daddy told me everything I would ever need was in this here book, and this is how I got through.”

“Yeah, you right,” Pastor Jackson said.

Kevin’s eyes glinted with curiosity. “You mind if I have a look at it?”

He opened the book, worn and yellow with a century’s age. He looked at the first pages, where the family tree, complete with dates of births and deaths, was written.

“An old friend of mine, Professor LeClaire, told me sometimes folks would write down important stuff in Bibles. I was just checking to see if somebody wrote something down we could use. But I don’t see anything here.”

“Can I have a look?” Julian reached a hand out for the book.

He opened it, fanning the pages. Nothing. Then, he took another look.

Like the cookbook, the first few pages were stuck together. After he separated them, he stared at one of the pages, then looked up. He passed the book back to Kevin who looked at the separated pages and smiled, his blue eyes suddenly full of light.

“Folks,” he said, “I think maybe we’ve got what we need.”

Two Years Later

W
ith wings spread wide and arcing low against the trees, an eagle dips, then soars high across the creek as an amber sun breaks the mauve-tinted morning sky. The bayou chorus wakes in full voice: a madrigal of morningbirds, the percussion of woodpeckers, the tremolo of water lapping rock. Magnolia blossoms scent the air, spoonbills nest in leafy beds of ancient oaks, and everywhere at Silver Creek life, willful and unstoppable, begins again.

Louisiana springs always arrive in a storm of color, scent, and sound—a lesson for the observant in the art of renewal—and for the Fortiers, the third spring after the Big One saw most of the hard work of renewal completed. On a spring morning two years after the flood, all the Fortiers gathered again at Silver Creek, their legacy intact, the spread of land handed down from generation to generation just as breathtaking as ever.

My daddy said everything I would ever need was in this book.
Simon had held the century-old Bible up high, brandishing it on the porch that October day, and he was right. On the first page, Jacob had scribbled the future of the Fortiers at Silver Creek. And though it was crudely written and barely visible, it was enough to satisfy a judge in Pointe Louree Parish that the land was intended for the Fortier clan, and no one else:

To my son on the day of his berth: My 240 acres of land at Siver Creeke, shall be the property of my son Simon, and my neece Genevieve, and there chilren and there chilren’s chilren, anod nobody else, until there are no more Fortiers left.

Jacob Fortier July 8, 1932

An “olographic” will, as Kevin had said, was as good as any in a Louisiana court of law. Nathan Larouchette protested mightily, pouring money and energy into getting the decision overturned, but to no avail. Judge H. Townsend Turner, a seventyish, bespectacled black man who’d grown up in the area and watched the landscape change for forty years, had no sympathy for good old boys with designs on black-owned land, and decided in favor of the Fortiers in fifteen minutes.

Meanwhile, a hundred miles downriver, the struggle for renewal went on. When Julian drove Simon back to New Orleans in late October to see his house, his mouth dropped open, then closed again and set defiantly. (After “Oh, Lord Jesus,” his next words were, “We got to get started fixing this.”) And as the whole city swarmed with hardworking volunteers from all over the country, Julian, Velmyra, Sylvia, a group of young law students from Penn State, and six Pentecostals from the Church of the Everlasting Light in Chicago gutted Simon’s double shotgun. While they dismantled drywalls and sorted, piled, bagged, and hauled Simon’s things, he shuttled back and forth between Sylvia’s house and his newly inherited mansion, where he discovered, to his great delight, Parmenter’s $5,000 restaurant-quality oven. In chef’s heaven, he refined a tasty new recipe for crawfish and oyster soufflé, and volunteered daily at Blessed Redeemer, preparing soup kitchen meals for returning New Orleanians working to piece back together their damaged houses and deconstructed lives.

The next two winters in New Orleans were hard. The dead had been buried, but the living struggled with survival and sanity while hospitals, schools, churches, apartment buildings, groceries, nursing homes, convenience stores, daycare centers, hotels, restaurants, and universities stood empty or nearly so. Block upon block of neighborhoods still lay dark and quiet, inhabited only by piles of sludge and debris, towering weeds, and the ghosts of promises unfulfilled. Four months after the flood, most of the city, save the areas barely touched by water, remained every bit as damaged as it had the days after the levees were breached.

But at the end of the year, while make-do government trailers for the enormous houseless population dotted the landscape as abundantly as pecan trees, Christmas lights, holly wreaths, mistletoe, reindeer, plastic Santas, and elves with ironic smiles sprang up throughout the city—on porches, rooftops, in trailer windows, in yards, and, oddly, atop rubble piles in trashed neighborhoods—as the city’ sense of celebration (and humor) prevailed in desperate times.

Like so many families wanting to make the most of the season, the Fortiers were determined to have a normal, traditional Christmas, crippled city or not. After the Soul Fire band returned from New York, where they drew huge crowds for their Christmas jams and raised thousands for the Treme and Ninth Ward rebuilding efforts, Julian drove to a tree nursery outside Baton Rouge, strapped a fourteen-foot Scotch pine onto the bed of Simon’s Ford truck, and drove it back to town, where he erected it in the great room of the St. Charles mansion. Four of Velmyra’s art students whose parents had brought them back to the city decorated it with popcorn garlands and hand-painted papier machê ornaments, and Simon paid them for their work in Christmas cookies and as much chocolate raspberry bread pudding as they could eat.

The old Parmenter mansion became a refuge for the extended Fortier clan—their friends, their friends’ friends, and anyone else who needed a place to crash for a night, a week, a month, or two—with a revolving door open to all. So on Christmas Eve night, with eight of the eighteen rooms occupied with some of Julian’s musician friends and two of Simon’s displaced neighbors still waiting for FEMA trailers, Simon concocted a batch of his creamy, bourbon-spiked egg nog, cooked an eight-gallon pot of gumbo, smoked a twenty-two pound turkey, and turned out five sweet potato pies. The house boomed with the noise of fifty or so friends, old neighbors, church members, and musicians. Julian built a blazing fire in the great room fireplace, and the lights from the tree and the scents of woodsmoke, pine, and gumbo set the holiday mood while everyone drank, ate, laughed, and celebrated being alive. The city might have been on its knees, but damn it, it was still New Orleans. They could still party with the best of them.

“Is it just me, or is it getting a little chilly in here?” Sylvia put down her wine glass and hugged her shoulders, talking loudly to be heard above the raucous laughter at a well-timed joke somebody told in the great room, and the silky stereophonic tenor of Nat King Cole. The fire, which roared and crackled an hour ago, had quieted to a flickering glow.

Grady Casey looked toward the living room. “Yeah. That fire’s getting a little low. I’ll fix that.”

He took a sip of his egg nog, then yelled toward the kitchen, “Hey, Fortier, come and fix this fire!”

Julian came out of the kitchen, checked the dying fire, and stoked the golden embers with an iron poker. “There’s some more wood on the porch,” he said.

He stepped out onto the gallery into the night air and looked up at the clear sky toward the river. The winter stars pulsed, winking against the velvet black. During the holiday season, with the scarred city trying to look its best, it was only at night that the details of devastation could truly hide in the dark. The houses across the street, like the Parmenter place, were festooned with Christmas lights and rooftop reindeer, and the live oak branches reaching over the streetcar tracks dripped strands of brightly colored beads.

Julian spread his shoulders and sucked in the night air.
It feels good out here.
The air in the house had gone dry with the fire, and the cool, night breeze on the porch felt refreshing, carrying a hint of dampness from the day’s early rain.

Things had been going well, or as well as they could. Simon’s house was still a few months from livable, but the New York trip had been a huge success, the guys had all had a great time, Julian was playing well, and his father seemed healthy and happy. The insurance company had failed them, insisting that since Simon carried no flood insurance, the years of premiums for wind and storm damage would not cover his house. But the transfer of ownership of Parmenter’s Creole Kitchen Red Beans and Rice Mix had come through, and the new flow of checks would finance the renovation.

Julian’s stalled career was back up and running; he’d spent most of the past weeks since the storm in New Orleans, but had flown back to New York to complete his second album for Blue Note,
Wading Home
, which he dedicated to Simon and which, he believed, demonstrated his best playing yet.

The thing between him and Vel was still up in the air. There was simply no time to deal with that—too much going on in both their lives. But tonight, he’d brushed past her in the crowded dining room; a whiff of her lavender oil took his breath away and he felt momentarily lightheaded. With her hair up a little in the back and curls spiraling near her ears, a blouse of bright red silk and diamond studs in each ear, she’d dazzled him to distraction. In the past few months he’d stepped back to give her breathing room while she helped her parents; they had not been as fortunate as Simon. With no flood insurance and no money, they lived with Velmyra in her tiny two-bedroom off Magazine Street while they waited for a FEMA trailer that should have arrived weeks before, and their own house still sat in ruins.

So, he’d left her mostly alone, except in his persistent dreams. Tonight, it was hard to look at her without his mouth going dry, hard not to think of all that had happened between them, their time together at Silver Creek, the child they’d made years ago. There might be a time for them, someday, but this was not it.

Julian looked down at the floorboards of the porch and pursed his lips. Damned if all that wood he’d just bought and stacked neatly the day before didn’t lay strewn recklessly across the whole porch. A dog, probably, the hound he’s seen loping up and down the street since his first day back. Dogs had to eat, too. He’d left the gate latch open with a bowl of water and a plate of pork chop bones out for him, and this is how he repaid him.

He sighed, reached down to gather and restack the wood.

“Hey there!”

In the shadows of the giant magnolia he couldn’t see who was yelling to him. He put the wood down and walked toward the edge of the steps. Probably a homeless man. He’d seen so many of them lately, walking the streets looking for a dollar or two or a meal. Sad that someone would be out on Christmas Eve looking for a handout, but not uncommon these days. The man was dressed warmly, a black leather jacket, a red plaid scarf, and a leather fisherman’s cap. Didn’t look homeless, but you never knew. Nowadays the word had taken on a whole new meaning.

The man walked a little closer to the wrought iron gate. “Saw your chimney smoke! Got some good dry firewood for ya! Forty a cord!”

“Got enough already!” Julian yelled back. “But thanks.”

He started stacking the wood again.

“Maybe you want to check this out!”

The man came up to the gate, a beautifully designed large wreath of long-needle pine branches and holly berries, woven and wrapped in red velvet ribbon, in his hands.