Wading Home_ A Novel Of New Orleans Part 14

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.

Peering into John Michel's evening-gray eyes, Claudinette saw advantage and a way to take it. She examined the proposal budding in them and offered one of her own-her whole hand and a piece of her heart, in exchange for freedom for her and her children.

Jean Michel mopped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his jacket.

"I'm an old man. When I die, you and your children will be the freest of the Lord's creatures. I swear it on the written word of G.o.d."

The sun turned her almond eyes into stones of fire.

"Free my children now," she said.

John Michel looked into her eyes and saw winters warmed by wood flame and her long brown arms. He saw a child with his shoulders and her upturned chin, a future where she would have what pleased her, and he would find his joy in the pleasing.

So John Michel cared for Claudinette as kindly as he had his own wife-keeping her distant enough for the sake of southern propriety, but close enough to bear him unbounded joy, and a second son. And so they lived, John Michel in the modest main cottage, Claudinette in a cabin in the quarters near the creek with her two girls, and John Michel's two sons by the two women (one white and one black but each equally free), scampering back and forth on the packed earth in between.

The two half brothers-John Paul, blond and fair as southern white pine, and Moses, dark as river stones-had grown up close as twins, and not until they were seven and five did they sit laughing beneath the sweetgum tree near the creek comparing the stark difference in the skin of their arms, the texture of their hair. Their curious wonder soon turned to casual indifference. Both boys enjoyed the favor of their father, and Claudinette doted on the smiling blond boy as much as she did her own three children. But after the boys grew to strapping young men, the differences that had seemed inconsequential before loomed larger.

John Paul, who grew into a smallish young man with eyes like his father's and golden hair that curled to his shoulders, was bighearted, foolhardy, and aimless. He loved to wander along Silver Creek, empty-minded and full of drink, and had a predilection for gambling, lying for sport, and slim-waisted women who belonged to other men. Moses, who stood half a head taller than most young men his age, with thick eyebrows set at an angle of worry that nearly met in the center of his forehead, worked hard, smiled infrequently. The laughter he'd shared with John Paul as a boy quieted the more he learned the real differences that separated him and his father's first-born.

But Moses was a hopeful man. By the time he'd reached his full impressive height and learned to carry his shoulders like a man with purpose, slavery had been over a while. Men who looked like him now had their own land. While his brother sat on the creek bank with a bottle of Kentucky rye and played on the bugle his father had given him, or traveled down to New Orleans for a midnight stagger through the Vieux Carre, Moses sharecropped a parcel of his father's land, fancying himself one day a successful planter the way his father had been. Why not? He was a strong, free man. As strong and as free as anybody.

But the more his plow-hands callused and bled, the more he understood that sharecropping was a long, hard road that led to an empty ditch. A sharecropper just picked at the crusted rim of freedom, and could never enjoy its sweet center. No way to earn enough to buy anything of real value, let alone a decent spread of land. No way to see a time of ease and rest in his old age. No way to have something to leave to his own children, should he have them. So when John Paul became twenty-one, and Moses watched as his father gave his older brother two hundred acres of fertile black earth veined with a sparkling creek, the frown between Moses' eyes deepened.

He went to his father, who now walked with a stoop and a cane. Moses still loved his brother, but fair was fair. After all, John Michel was his his father, too. Wasn't he ent.i.tled to land as much as his white brother, who'd done nothing to earn it? father, too. Wasn't he ent.i.tled to land as much as his white brother, who'd done nothing to earn it?

John Michel stroked his yellowing beard. His beloved Claudinette had been dead for years now. In both his son's eyes were the gentle smiles of their mothers. But give Moses his own land? Afraid not.

"But when I reach twenty-one years?"

John Michel had witnessed the heedless pride, the erect walk and upturned head of his son. Black skin, a straight spine, an unbowed head and eyes that looked straight on at white men-all were an open invitation to trouble. Make him a landowner too? John Michel shook his head.

"It is for your own good. You think you can hold on to this land after I am gone? Ha! These folks around here, they will ruin you, take your land, if they do not kill you. Likely, they will do both."

Moses turned away, his resentment brick-hard at the bottom of his heart. Was it really fear for his safety that was his father's concern? He didn't know, and his ire toward both his father and brother grew darker as time pa.s.sed.

But on a late summer Sunday evening, John Michel knocked on Moses' cabin door, his eyes wide and breath short. John Paul was missing, and Moses was to go and look for him.

Moses shook his head sardonically. Probably playing that bugle, down by the creek. But at the creek he was nowhere to be found, so Moses. .h.i.tched his horse to the wagon and drove into town. And there was John Paul in his favorite watering hole, drunk out of his mind, a dazed look on his face, staring down the barrel of a gun.

Flickering light from the oil lamps outside the saloon glowed through the dirty windows and glazed the bald head of the man holding the gun. He was the biggest white man Moses had ever seen, even taller than he was and twice as wide, and his hateful smile revealed a large gap between his teeth. From what Moses could tell, he'd caught John Paul with his woman, and was determined to end any possibility for another tryst.

The gap-toothed man stepped toward John Paul and c.o.c.ked the trigger. Moses raised his hand toward the man and glowered at his brother with narrowed, contemptuous eyes.

"Wait. Let me do it," Moses told the man. "I've got more issue with this man than anybody. If somebody's going to kill him, it ought to be me."

The gap-toothed man looked up at Moses incredulously. To prove his words, Moses lunged toward his brother and landed a heavy blow on the side of his face, then planted another deep in his gut. John Paul cried out, doubled over in pain and fell to his knees, his blue eyes gazing in confusion at the brother who was now betraying him.

The man tossed Moses the gun. "Be my guest," he said, the vision of his enemy being shot by this tall darky gleaming in his mind.

Moses took the gun, aimed it at his brother's heart.

Then he grinned and tossed it back.

"Don't need that," he said. "I'll finish this fool with my own two hands."

The man laughed as Moses dragged his bloodied brother out of the saloon. Outside, he put John Paul into the wagon and headed it back toward Silver Creek.

When he arrived at his father's house, Moses carried his brother over his back past John Michel, sitting in his parlor with his Bible open, up the staircase to John Paul's room. There, he dressed the wound he'd inflicted, and rubbed ointment on the gut he'd bruised with his own fist. Then he undressed his drunken brother and put him to bed.

John Michel understood the heart of his darker son, who had beaten his beloved, f.e.c.kless brother to save his life. The dusk-gray eyes brimmed with grat.i.tude. Not speaking, Moses walked past him, watered his horse, and went to bed to get up early and tend his fields.

When John Paul recovered, he came to his brother, his head bowed in contrition.

"Thank you," he said, "for my life."

Moses placed a hand solidly on his brother's shoulder and gave him a hard, determined look.

"He'll be looking for you. Always. You'll never be safe here."

John Paul looked down at the ground, kicked the dirt off one boot with the heel of another. Then, hearing a fluttering overhead, looked up as three blackbirds winged north toward the unknown world. It was as if he needed to hear the words to do the sensible thing, the thing that was already flitting around his mind. The next day, at dawn, Moses woke his brother and pressed eight silver dollars into his palm.

"You best go now, before it gets light."

And without saying goodbye to his father, John Paul saddled his horse and rode as far away from Silver Creek and the gap-toothed man as he could get.

Months pa.s.sed and John Michel listened in vain for his son's hearty laugh, the wail of a bra.s.s bugle coming from the creek. Moses measured the bloom of grief in his father's eyes, and as the winter turned to spring, then summer, then winter again, John Paul did not return.

But John Michel never forgot that wherever his son was, he was alive, and for that he had Moses to thank. After John Paul left, John Michel studied his black son-the manly set of his brow, the back muscled by hard work, the large hands toughened by plow handles, the intelligent eyes that seemed to know more of the world than most of the white men he knew.

On Moses' twenty-first birthday, John Michel called him to his bed.

Frail, sick with consumption and the grief-wounds of loss, John Michel reached out a pale, white hand to his black son.

"I placed my trust in the wrong son-you were always the worthy one." His breath came hard and heavy from his sunken chest. "You will never find a better piece of land than Silver Creek. Guard it with your life. Don't let anybody take it from you."

He handed his son the old black Bible from the table by his bed.

"Everything you need, son, you'll find in here."

Moses took the old weathered Bible and pressed it to his chest. And with that, he became the sole steward of the land at Silver Creek.

When the old man died, Moses was left with his half-sisters, Belle and Patrice, the memory of the golden-haired brother whose life he'd saved, and the most beautiful stretch of green, fertile land in Pointe Louree Parish, if not all of Louisiana. With his sisters, their husbands and their children, Moses worked the earth until it bled riches, and turned it into a profitable paradise.

But as time pa.s.sed, the place his only brother occupied in his heart still felt hollow. He missed the hearty laugh. The foolhardy, fun-loving ways. The music of a bugle wafting up from the creek. Many nights, Moses questioned himself in the depths of his soul and found no answers. For a brief moment, when he'd seen his white brother staring down the barrel of a gun, a notion had pawed across his mind: If this man shoots my brother, Silver Creek could be mine If this man shoots my brother, Silver Creek could be mine. The bitter taste of betrayal still coated his tongue.

Had he betrayed him? No. He had saved his life, he told himself. But he had sent his brother away, breaking his father's heart, and to his surprise, his own? Had he done it for his brother's safety, or to tilt an unbalanced world in his his favor? It crossed his mind to saddle up and search for John Paul. But search where? North? West? In time he resigned himself to three things: that he would never in life see his brother again, that he had a hand in the heartbreak that hastened his father's death, and that both truths were the price he'd paid for beautiful Silver Creek. favor? It crossed his mind to saddle up and search for John Paul. But search where? North? West? In time he resigned himself to three things: that he would never in life see his brother again, that he had a hand in the heartbreak that hastened his father's death, and that both truths were the price he'd paid for beautiful Silver Creek.

He brooded over this for a while, until he met Clothilde, a sweetfaced woman with eyes like new pennies and a voice that reminded him of morning birds. At the Sunday church supper beneath the stand of oaks, he studied her bowed lips, the long graceful curve of her neck, the slim fingers, and asked her name. And a year after they married, Moses pulled out the old leather Bible his father had given him and turned to the first page. On a rare frostbitten day in February, after his wife's long and painful labor, he wrote the name of his newborn son, Jacob.

And to Jacob, a caramel-skinned child with the lightly textured hair and light eyes of his grandfather John Michel, Moses pa.s.sed on the word: love the land, take it and make it your own. And Jacob did-but John Michel's prophesied peril, having skipped a generation, came to light in Jacob's time. When he grew to manhood and inherited Silver Creek, jealous white planters and townsmen, looking to increase their fortunes and destroy his, tried every trick they could think of to break his spirit. Cheating him out of payment for his crops. Stealing his plow, his mule. Burning crosses in his yard. Starting small fires in the middle of the night, one that even burned down his barn.

There were times when it seemed the whole world conspired to break him. But like his father had, he wrapped his soul around the land and clenched it like a fist.

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The air in the room was cooler now, or at least the sweat on his forehead had seemed to disappear. As he lay remembering Jacob, Simon felt his lips move, and the memory of his words seemed to unfurl like a long litany in his head.

Sundays after church, all of them sitting on the cedar plank gallery in cane-back pine rockers. Jacob's eyes glistening, his preacherly voice tromboning through the trees as he fanned himself with banana leaves and addressed his wife Liza, his son Simon, and his cousin, Maree, her husband James, their daughter Genevieve, and anyone else who would listen.

Nothing is as enduring as land, because it's land, not water, that covers the whole earth. Beneath every pool of water-every stream, creek, marsh, lake, river, ocean-you go deep enough, you'll find land. Water, always in motion, s.h.i.+fts and moves. Rivers dry or change their course, sometimes disappear. But land will always be. They say the world is mostly water, but what's beneath all that water? Land. Earth. Way down deep, maybe, but it's surely there. Land needs water, true, but without land, water knows no bounds. With land, you can make a life for yourself, be lifted up. Love it, tend it, take care of it, and it will take care of you.

Tall and slender like Moses, Jacob would roll his head back against his rocker squinting against the fierce Louisiana sun, a wooden pipe clenched between strong white teeth, his gaze spanning Silver Creek. He spread his long arms wide in an evangelical pose, his sing-song baritone thundering with conviction.

I'm tellin' you, the Lord and the land will provide! You got you some good land, a strong back and two hands, you ain't never got to go hungry, you can work that earth and beat it and tame it til it feeds you, you can eat every day G.o.d sends. You can hunt, you can fish, you can plow, you can plant.

You can live.

And Silver Creek provided. Through all the years of hard summer sun, spring floods, and the rare winter frost, the land gave selflessly, generously. Maree, a tiny but st.u.r.dy knot of a woman, would sh.e.l.l, clean, skin, or gut whatever the menfolk had netted, hooked, trapped, or shot, and with the treasured recipes learned at the knee of her grandmother Claudinette, turned her daughter Genevieve and her nephew Simon into masters of the kitchen. Through every turn of fortune the whole country endured, the Fortier table was never empty, and savory stews and soups and smoked meats and fruit pies overflowed from the cabin near the creek, and the aromas circling in the evening air mixed with the fragrance of the green, nurtured land.

As Jacob's fortunes increased, he bought more land. And built himself a second house in New Orleans, just because he wanted to, and could. And burned his son Simon's ear with the story of how the richest land in the whole parish became a tall, thick-browed black man's land.

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He felt a dryness in his throat, a thirst beyond any thirst before, as he remembered his father's last days, and the promise he, Simon, had made to Jacob. A crying-out sound was trapped in his throat, but his mouth still would not work. He tried to lift his hand, but it would not move. He would just have to wait for the woman with the soft hands and the blues-song whisper. She would bring the water.

So he let his mind go where it chose.

Julian. Julian had not yet found him.

The land. It was all gone now. The house in New Orleans built with Jacob's own hands. Gone, more than likely. That, he could live with; that, he could fix. But Silver Creek? He had tried to make Julian understand, if only for the sake of his unborn children, the grandchildren he would never see. But early on he'd seen a glow in his eyes, the same glow that rose in Jacob's eyes whenever he'd spoken of Silver Creek. But in Julian's eyes, that glow reflected the whole world beyond it.

But did it really matter? The end of the line had come, the end of him, the end of Silver Creek.He turned his head, and surprised at having the strength to do it, he relaxed his lips into a smile. It didn't matter. His son, after all, had his own life to live, his own dreams. G.o.d bless him. He, Simon, had had his run, and it had been a good one.

15.

When Genevieve finished her story of the Fortiers and Silver Creek, Kevin folded his arms in front of him and bowed his head. Velmyra smiled, her eyes moist.

Julian leaned his elbows on his knees and rested his head between his palms, as if Genevieve's story weighed so heavily in his mind it took both hands to hold it. If this was the story Simon had told him a million times in his kitchen while crawfish pies browned and bubbled in the oven and gumbo cackled on the stove, he hadn't remembered it seeming so real.

Genevieve looked up at Julian, the light raking across her brows. She folded both hands in her lap resolutely and aimed a soft gaze at him.

"So baby, when you go trying to fix all this business with Silver Creek, think about your daddy, his daddy, and his daddy before. What the place meant to them. You got to know exactly what it is you fighting for."

Julian inhaled deeply, then frowned. "Daddy told me some of the stories, but I don't think I knew all of this before."

"Oh, baby. You been told all this before." Genevieve nodded, gave him a wizened look. "Ain't n.o.body blaming you for forgetting, but you been told before."

Either Genevieve had rendered the ancestors' lives with a fullness he'd never realized before, or it was just that now he was willing to listen, not just hear. John Michel. Claudinette. Moses. What must their lives have been like? He half-remembered that John Michel, a white planter, loved the pretty-eyed, boot-black woman who had been his slave, and from them had come Moses, who had gotten the land intended for his brother. But none of these people had meant any more to him than characters in a book.

Even grandfather Jacob, who'd died when Simon was only sixteen, had been little more than myth to Julian. While he vaguely recalled something about Jacob and his trials with the land, none of the details sounded too familiar; he'd always listened with half an ear and an itinerant mind, wandering to thoughts of whatever he planned to do as soon as the storytelling was done. But in death, his father now resided in the realm of his ancestors-alongside John Michel, Claudinette, Moses and the others-and Julian had listened to the story with both ears and a full heart.

Julian was silent, lost in a memory. Back when he was small, four or five, he'd actually enjoyed those summers skipping across the yard, picking the bushes and trees clean of their sugary fruit, catching crawfish in the creek shallows for Simon and Genevieve to boil for supper. But Genevieve was right; as he grew older, things changed. He remembered being eleven or so and bored to distraction as Genevieve, his Auntie Maree and his father told the family stories, while all he could think of was the city where he lived.

He'd been a young musician in love with the sound of his own horn. New Orleans had been a street party begging him to join in and cut a step, and when its two/four time clicked in with the rhythm of his pulse, he couldn't tell where the city's heartbeat left off and his began. Even at Silver Creek, the music lingering in his head, he would catch his foot tapping to a city groove. He had had no patience for a country backwater where the only night music was the swelling ring of cicadas and the reedy whine of wind through pines.

Julian blinked his eyes. These last couple of days, he'd begun to see how a place like this could crawl under your skin and get into your blood. Velmyra had been right; Silver Creek mornings were miracles, liquid sun spilling gold onto green earth like a primordial dream. Honeyed air sagging with a weight that seemed to settle the rhythms of the heart. Tall pines sheltering the secret and the eternal. A creek as timeless as memory itself. From Jean Michel to Simon, one hundred and fifty years of Fortier men crazy in love with a piece of land. They'd all known something from birth that he was just beginning to see.

Genevieve's ladderback rocker squeaked against the floorboards of the porch as she got up.

"I'm a little hungry. Anybody else want a little something to eat?"

They ended up staying for an early supper. Fresh-made collard greens with smoked hamhocks and b.u.t.ter beans with sweet onions were staples in any kitchen where Genevieve cooked, even if it wasn't her own, and she hummed as she bustled around the stove. In a cast iron skillet she poured a little fat, then batter for hot water cornbread. When the smell of the homemade Creole spice she'd used in the deep fried chicken began to scent the air, Genevieve laid out china on the dining room table, and her guests sat down and gorged themselves.

After supper, Genevieve's first words after table-clearing seemed to come from nowhere. "Let's go for a walk. I got something to show y'all." And as if her voice had levitating powers, they all got up. The sky was still light, the breezes cooling, and n.o.body could think of a reason not to go. Besides, after a meal like that, it would be ungracious to refuse a hospitable old woman who cooked like a dream.

She grabbed her yellow straw sun hat, a hickory walking stick, and a green plaid shawl from the front closet and draped it around her thin shoulders, and laced on a pair of purple Adidas sneakers. "This way," she said, stepping back out onto the porch and pointing the stick toward the afternoon sun. The west end of Pastor Jackson's sixty acres b.u.t.ted against the northeast corner of the Silver Creek land, and what she wanted to show them was close enough to get there and back long before dark.

They struck out toward the descending sun where the pines near the horizon s.h.i.+elded them from its low slanting glare, and Julian kept his eyes on the leaf-and-twig-strewn path. This was no leisurely stroll through a cleared patch of flat earth; this was the woods, thick and deep. What had Genevieve called Julian? City boy? Well, they'd not walked more than fifteen minutes before his basketball jock knees began to ache, and his second stumble on a break in the earth had Velmyra reaching for his arm. A few weeks away from the gym, and he wasn't sure he could keep pace with a seventy-something-year-old woman.

But these woods were amazing, like nothing he'd seen before, at least not since he was a child. The air ripe with pine, the silence almost sacred, broken only by leaf crackle beneath his feet or the sounds of birds whose names he didn't know. Before long, the deep light of afternoon sun was so hidden by the spindly trees that it seemed the evening dark had already taken hold.

Genevieve and Kevin had taken the lead, Genevieve with a hand on her walking stick and an arm strung through Kevin's, both occasionally laughing as Kevin's tall frame leaned over now and then in her direction to hear her speak. They seemed lost in conversation, and every few minutes Genevieve would stop, turn around, and point, her voice intoning like a tour guide's. "Now those three cypress trees over there-that's where the school house used to be," or "See beyond those pecans? That's where the church used to be where I was christened." And later, when they'd gotten closer to the creek, "Slave cabins. Right down that path."

Vel's gazed lingered in the direction of Genevieve's last announcement. "Really? Are they still there?"

"No, baby. Burned down a long time ago."

Julian had thought of apologizing to Vel for the inconvenience of the long hike-this wasn't part of the deal-but was stopped by her contented smile and easy bouncing gait as she ambled alongside him, wide-eyed, hands dug into her shorts pockets when she wasn't pointing out some sort of interesting bird or patch of wildflowers or tree or berry-laden shrub. She was, it appeared, enjoying herself. In fact, everyone was, he realized, as Genevieve's and Kevin's laughter mixed with the rustle of sc.r.a.ping branches and leaf against leaf in the light swirls of late afternoon breeze. If Genevieve was upset about any of the recent events-Simon's disappearance, the whole land thing-she didn't show it. Or maybe this was how she handled it: walking out her worries in the woods.

As they walked, patches of Genevieve's and Kevin's conversation came through: Genevieve was talking about the creek, which was not within sight, but faintly audible, if you kept real quiet, from this part of the land. The creek, she'd said, fed into a small river with an Indian name she couldn't quite p.r.o.nounce, which fed into another, which fed into the Mississippi, and on into the Gulf. He'd never thought about that before-how the smallest little thing can move along to become part of something bigger. Like a chain of lives that began long ago, one small life flowing into another, and another, and on and on, until a whole lineage is born.

Nearly a half hour had pa.s.sed when Genevieve stopped and pointed her stick to a s.p.a.ce between four live oak trees where stood a decrepit cabin of old, weathered wood.

The trees hovered over the house so close they seemed as one, their leaves and branches crowning the roof like the elaborate headdress of an African queen. Eaves sagged where birds had nested in them. The roof showed gaping holes, and dry vines splayed out like boney fingers as they trailed up along the clapboard sides. It was much older and smaller than Genevieve's house but in a similar Creole style-the broad roof sloping down over the gallery, the thin wooden columns s.p.a.ced a few feet apart, and the whole thing raised up on blocks of stone, allowing a foot of crawl s.p.a.ce beneath it.

"This was Claudinette's place, the only house still standing from back in those days," Genevieve explained, according to the handed down stories, that Claudinette insisted her lover Jean Michel build her a place where they could meet on equal terms, a place of her own that was neither slave quarters-reminding her of her station-nor plantation house, reminding her of his.

They all stared in awe. The house and its sheltering trees had an organic quality to it, almost spooky, like something alive. It had the slightly withered look of something that should have crumbled into the earth long ago, but apart from its sagging eaves and the holes in the roof, stood stubbornly straight and tall, defiant against the ravages of time.

"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."