Welding with Children (5 page)

“What?”

“I've never laid eyes on you, but I can tell you're a certain kind of idiot, and you know nothing about my father. My daughter worshiped him. He was the family anchor, so to speak. I don't know what happened the day my mother died, but now my daughter, who is prone to depression anyway, is distraught, really distraught about what you dredged up. You've done a very bad thing.”

Mel felt as if he were capsized on the bottom of the river. “I thought the article was accurate. Otherwise, I wouldn't have gone—”

“It took me all night, Mr. DeSoto, all night, and my father's memory is still not patched up in Leslie's mind. And now I'd like for you to stay away from us.”

He picked up his hands. “Of course.”

She turned for the door, but then she glanced back at him. “When you look at one of these images you find in a used camera, what do you see?”

“Meaning?” he said without thinking.

She thought about this a moment, then said, “Why don't you just look at it?”

*   *   *

That night, Mel had a dream that he was trying to develop a photo of his wife. The first image in the tray was supposed to be her on their honeymoon, but instead, the figure of a little girl in a white Communion dress bloomed under the chemical. He put a different negative in the enlarger, one of his daughter, and again the little Italian girl appeared in the tray. One after another, no matter what negative he exposed on the easel, the little girl smiled up at him from the steps of a church, hands clasped. He woke up, the child's face razored into his brain, and tried to figure what the image meant, but he could not. He remembered the photo of the hairy father sprawled on the sofa and tried to imagine a connection, but no meaning came to him. He went into his darkroom and clicked on the enlarger, watching the face of Amanda Springer reversed in every way on the white background of his easel. He made a print.

*   *   *

Two months passed, and then a smiling man came into the shop, handing over a card telling that he was a deaf-mute. The man placed a Crown Graphic on the counter, pulled out a pad, and wrote that he could lip-read and that he wanted two hundred dollars for the camera. Mel examined the bellows and noted the make of the lens.

He aimed his mouth at the man. “I can let you have one seventy-five, tops.”

The man wrote in a neat, fast hand, “I've been offered a hundred ninety dollars for it.” He put three negative carriers on the counter. “These go with it,” he wrote.

Mel looked the man in the eye. He didn't appear to be any different from anyone else, just more attentive. “In that case, we'll do one ninety,” he told the deaf-mute. He pulled out an invoice and began writing, then asked the man for his signature. The man read his lips and nodded. A little light came on in Mel's head, and when the deaf-mute looked up, he asked, “Can you read lips on television?”

The man wrote “Some” on his pad.

“Can you tell what syllable someone is saying in a photograph?”

“Don't know,” the man wrote.

Mel went to the filing cabinet and pulled out an eight-by-ten print of the last photo taken of Amanda Springer, her mouth open, the ominous bow of the navy vessel at her back.

The deaf-mute lowered his head. “Ga,” he wrote.

Mel put his finger next to her mouth. “Could she be saying ‘Ca' as in
camera?”

The deaf-mute furrowed his brow and bent down, and now he did look different, like an animal on a scent. He picked up his pen. “Yes,” he scribbled. Glancing at the photo again, he wrote, “Pretty.”

“Pretty,” Mel agreed, forming his lips around the word.

*   *   *

The obituary column at the library had stated that Amanda Johnsons Springer was survived by a younger brother, Malcolm Z. Mel found a Malcolm Z. Johnsons living in Metairie and called him. A scorched old voice boiled out of the phone, telling him that Leland Springer was a coward who wouldn't save his sister's life. “I'll never forgive him for not at least trying to pull her to safety. She had a lot to live for with her daughter and her photography.”

“Her photography?” Mel's fingers tightened on the receiver.

“You know that guy Clarence Laughlin? The one who took all those pictures of mansions and double-exposed them? He got famous for that. But she had it all over him. She made him look like he was shooting an Instamatic. I still got some of her stuff in a box, and what she could do with shadows was unreal.”

Mel could not stop the old man, but he listened for most of an hour as Malcolm created the life his sister would have led had she lived. He did not hear what he wanted to hear, that Leland was a nice guy, that the newspaper was wrong about him when it said he pleaded at the rail of the steamer for five minutes for someone to catch the camera he was holding. Then he remembered something. The official statement issued by the Coast Guard had stated that the old wooden boat had parted and capsized in less than one minute after the collision, the same thing Captain McNabb had told him in the rest home. He listened to Malcolm until the old man had made himself sleepy with talk, and then he thanked him and hung up.

*   *   *

Mel was holding a three-ring binder, standing next to a mooring cleat at the foot of Canal Street, when the girl walked up warily and looked past him, into the Mississippi. Downriver a hundred yards, a ferryboat discharged vehicles, and upriver a gaudy floating casino rolled on the swells of a passing ship. The girl's eyes were red, as though she had a cold. She was nervous, and her fingernails were stabbing her palms. “So this is where it happened,” she said. “My mom would kill you if she knew you'd asked me here.”

“I'm sorry you saw that article about your grandfather.”

“So am I.”

“Real sorry. I even checked into the story some more and found your grandmother's brother.”

She stepped up onto the timber at the edge of the wharf, her toes over water. “I thought I knew him so well.”

Mel stepped back. “Look, you better come away from the edge.”

“I'm okay,” she told him.

“Well, I wanted to tell you that article wasn't right. The facts, I mean. I've been checking.”

She put one foot out over the river twenty feet below. “Still, he didn't save her.”

He moved next to her as slowly as he could, and he opened the binder. “Now, look at her face in these photos. She was looking at your grandfather. What do you see in her expression?”

The girl peered into the binder, turned three plastic-covered pages of photographs, leaning away from the river. “She really like him.”

“Liked him?” Mel ducked his head. “She was glowing. She was crazy about him. That type of expression feeds off of another's, don't you think?” He put a finger onto an eight-by-ten photo. “Look what's here. In her hand.”

The girl bent her head. “What is that?”

“It's an old Weston light meter. I noticed that for the first time last night. She was reading off settings for him.”

The girl brushed her hair out of her eyes. “So
she
was the photographer in the family?”

“Her brother says she was an artist. He told me that she worked as a part-time secretary for ninety cents an hour and saved enough for the Rolleiflex, the best camera in the store in those days. She must have waited years for it.”

The girl put a hand on a photograph. “Was this the first time?”

“I imagine the roll we removed might have been the only one ever put in it. And you see this last picture?” He told her about the deaf-mute then. As she sat down and dangled her legs over the waves, he bent with her, his tie going over her shoulder. “I'd bet anything she had just turned from the rail when that last shot was taken. Who knows what was going through her mind when she realized what was about to happen? Maybe she shouted something like ‘The camera,' or ‘Toss the camera to the dock.'”

The girl's mouth opened a little. “And he turned his back for one second, and then it was over.”

Mel closed the binder and squatted on the wharf, his leather lace-ups protesting. “Your grandfather was what you thought he was. You can see it in
her
face.”

The girl shaded her eyes with her hand and looked across to the Algiers side. “I don't know. If he were alive, I could jump into the river and he could save me. That would prove something.”

Mel suddenly looked south, where the current was threading. He realized that he had one chance to say the right thing. Finally, he told her, “Yes, it would prove something, but he's not here, and these photographs are.”

She shook her head. “I don't even know if he could swim.” Suddenly, she looked up into his face. “The pictures. Can I have them?”

“Of course,” he said, standing.

She put a hand up to him. “Do you think they'll be enough?”

He helped her to her feet. “Just look at everything in them—objects, shadows, even the blurry parts.” He walked her toward the noise and dusty light of Canal Street. “You'll see.”

G
OOD FOR THE
S
OUL

Father Ledet took a scorching swallow of brandy and sat in an iron chair on the brick patio behind the rectory, hemmed in by walls of privet stitched through with honeysuckle. His stomach was full from the Ladies' Altar Society supper, where the sweet, sweet women of the parish had fed him pork roast, potato salad, and sweet peas, filling his plate and making over him as if he were an old spayed tomcat who kept the cellar free of rats. He was a big man, white-haired and ruddy, with gray eyes and huge spotted hands that could make a highball glass disappear. It was Thursday evening and nothing much happened on Thursday evenings. The first cool front of the fall was breezing through the pecan trees on the church lot, and nothing is so important in Louisiana as that first release from the sopping, buggy, overheated funk of the atmosphere. Father Ledet breathed deeply in the shadow of a statue of Saint Francis. He took another long swallow, glad that the assistant pastor was on a visit home in Iowa and that the deacon wouldn't be around until the next afternoon. Two pigeons lit on Saint Francis's upturned hands as if they knew who he was. Father Ledet watched the light fade and the privet darken, and then he looked a long time at the pint of brandy before deciding to pour himself another drink.

The phone rang in the rectory, and he got up carefully, moving inside among the dark wood furnishings and dim holy light. It was a parishioner, Mrs. Clyde Arceneaux, whose husband was dying of emphysema.

“We need you for the Anointing of the Sick, Father.”

“Um, yes.” He tried to say something else, but the words were stuck back in his throat, the way dollar bills sometimes wadded up in the tubular poor box and wouldn't drop down when he opened the bottom.

“Father?”

“Of course. I'll just come right over there.”

“I know you did it for him last week. But this time, he might really be going, you know.” Mrs. Arceneaux's voice began to sound teary. “He wants you to hear his confession.”

“Um.” The priest had known Clyde Arceneaux for fifteen years. The old man dressed up on Sunday, came to church, but he stayed out on the steps and smoked with three other men as reverent as himself. As far as he knew, Clyde had never been to confession.

*   *   *

Father Ledet locked the rectory door and went into the garage to start the parish car, a venerable black Lincoln. He backed out onto the street, and when the car stopped, he still floated along in a drifting crescent, and he realized that he'd had maybe an ounce too much of brandy. It occurred to him that he should call the housekeeper to drive him to the hospital. It would take only five minutes for her to come over, but then, the old Baptist woman was always figuring him out, and he would have to endure Mrs. Scott's roundabout questions and sniffs of the air. Father Ledet felt his mossy human side take over, and he began to navigate the streets of the little town on his own, stopping the car too far into the intersection at Jackman Avenue, clipping a curb on a turn at Bourgeois Street. The car had its logical movement, but his head had a motion of its own.

*   *   *

Patrolman Vic Garafola was parked in front of the post office, talking to the dispatcher about a cow eating string beans out of Mrs. LeBlanc's garden, when he heard a crash in the intersection behind him. In his rearview, he saw that a long black sedan had battered the side of a powder-blue Ford. He backed his cruiser fifty feet and turned on his flashers. When he got out and saw his own parish priest sitting wide-eyed behind the steering wheel, he ran to the window.

“You all right, Father?”

The priest had a little red mark on his high forehead, but he smiled dumbly and nodded. Patrolman Garafola looked over to the smashed passenger side door of a faded Crown Victoria. A pretty older woman sat in the middle of the bench seat holding her elbow. He opened the door and saw that Mrs. Mamie Barrilleaux's right arm was obviously broken, and her mouth was twitching with pain. Vic's face reddened because it made him angry to see nice people get hurt when it wasn't their fault.

“Mrs. Mamie, you hurtin' a lot?” Vic asked. Behind him, the priest walked up and put his hand on Vic's shoulder. When the woman saw Father Ledet, her face was transfigured.

“Oh, it's nothing, just a little bump. Father, did I cause the accident?”

The patrolman looked at the priest for the answer.

“Mamie, your arm.” He took his hand off the policeman and stepped back. Vic could see that the priest was shocked. He knew that Father Ledet was called out to give last rites to strangers at gory highway wrecks all the time, but this woman was the vice president of the Ladies Altar Society, the group who polished the old church, put flowers on the altar, knit afghans to put on his lap in the drafty wooden rectory.