How to Read the Air (16 page)

I told my students as much on the first day of class, after they had nervously shuffled their way in and taken their seats according to a self-selecting order that would take me several weeks to understand.

“It’s great to be here,” I said. “I’m very excited about this semester.” Which was not how I normally began the first day of classes, with such a high-hearted enthusiastic tone, but in this case I thought an exception was in order. Angela, by design or coincidence, was coming back home that night.

XI

There is almost nothing left of Laconte’s fort these days. What was once here has either slowly eroded with time or since been picked off piece by piece by bored kids or scavengers of American history, who have carted away what little remains to homes and workshops where the past is minutely and painstakingly re-created. The large stones that once served as the fort’s first line of defense against attack are fortunately still relatively intact, being far too large and heavy to be lifted away in the night. To some degree they are the real reasons I’m here—these large, unpolished stones, carried here block by block by teams of horses. After the gun they are the first real signs of modern warfare in America, and speak to the old European tendency to draw boundaries and solidify ownership. These stones say unequivocally, This is mine, and everything that I can see beyond these walls is mine as well.

The battle that was fought here must have been a remarkable, vicious sight: long and meticulously planned to draw out the forts’ inhabitants one wave at a time for the slaughter. The stones had served their purpose well. No one as it turns out was killed behind their walls, and all who died here did so outside in the open field, either running for their lives or pleading for mercy.

These are just some of the facts that I’ve since picked up about Fort Laconte and the battle in 1687 that brought it to an end. There are other facts as well, although none as personally relevant. For example, the fort had a prison inside its walls, even though it never at any point had more than one hundred inhabitants, all of whom knew each other well and had traveled for months and years up and down the Mississippi coastline together, exploring and claiming the new frontier for France. The prison was used only once against a member of the expedition as punishment for hoarding food in the winter when rations were scarce. It was used on multiple occasions to hold captured Tamora Indians who had remained from the beginning hostile to the presence of Jean-Patrice Laconte and his men. The men who were held here were often tortured. Their wrists and ankles were bound together for days at a time. They were hung upside down, beaten, flayed, and almost always starved. They died quickly from hunger or disease.

The fort took five months to construct. The outer walls were approximately fifteen feet high and nearly a foot thick. There was a storage shed for munitions and another for food. Jean-Patrice Laconte had his own private stable built inside the fort’s walls for his two favorite mares to make sure they would never be slaughtered if there was ever a food shortage.

One great difference between the fort as it stands today and as it appeared to my father and mother thirty years earlier is the wooden fence built around the remains. The fence is minor, and if it had not been for the “Do Not Enter” signs posted every couple of feet along its wall, I would have probably walked around it in search of the entrance gate. As it stands, there is no gate, or if there is one it is surely locked and would be as difficult to get through as the fence itself.

The guard has returned to his shoebox. From where I’m standing I can see him clearly through the side window. His body is perched over the day’s newspaper, his hat lying harmless inches away. His vigilance has tired itself out and he’s gone back to being just another ordinary man, concerned with the day’s sports news and politics. I don’t know if I have the right to feel a certain pride at having been able to put him to rest, but I do anyway. It’s just as I had hoped. I am not a man to be feared or worried over; I have a face that even a skeptical stranger could learn to trust.

 

 

 

 

I take the long way around the perimeter of the fence, ducking into the shade cast by a nearby copse of trees—white elms with glistening, almost translucent trunks. Near one I find a spot almost completely hidden from view. I place my hands on top of the fence and hurl my body smoothly over to the other side where the shade is even thicker, the grass still damp with dew. It’s been said that the only way to truly know any history is to walk in its footsteps. People the world over make pilgrimages to this or that historical landmark to do precisely that. They congregate on Civil War battlefields, at grave sites, and at the homes of the dead to get a glimpse of the past as it must have looked a century or millennium ago. I can’t say that my aims here are quite so grand, and even if they were, there isn’t much left here for me to imagine. This place is an historical landmark in only the strictest sense of the phrase, to the degree that almost any piece of land on this earth could be said to be of significance to someone.

What happened here between my parents late on a September afternoon thirty years earlier is, I have to admit, largely a matter of wild and perhaps even errant speculation. The events of 1687 are shrouded in less mystery than those of that day. In effect, 1687 has more going for it than 1977, and I don’t think it would be wrong to say that I can see clearer the causes and effects of a battle more than three hundred years old, along with the lives that fought and died in it, than I can understand my parents, who for their part always remained strangers to me.

Looking at the remains of the fort—its size and scope, its proximity to the forest and to the spring that runs alongside it—I don’t think anyone who came here did so expecting or wanting to fight. Laconte’s fort is more defensive than anything else—an extra precautionary measure for a man who knew he was on hostile ground. After most of the men here were killed, a nearby garrison of French soldiers was sent in to investigate and if possible capture or kill the Tamora warriors who had raided the fort. In the official report written by Captain Pierre-Henri Scipion, a simple, rhetorical question is asked, almost as if by accident, near the end of the last paragraph. Why, Pierre-Henri wanted to know, didn’t Laconte equip the fort’s walls to defend against an attack? I can see what he means now. There are hardly any cracks or holes along the fort’s wall to defend from. When the fort was attacked the men inside had to either shoot blind from over the top or risk their heads. You could say this was an accident, or an oversight, or a criminally stupid thing to do on the part of Laconte, but that would fly against the facts, in defiance of all reason and logic. Laconte was a decorated and well-known soldier of two different wars. He had lost his right hand in one battle and had been injured on multiple occasions both before and after. He was not a man who took risks lightly. He knew how to defend. This I imagine is why Scipion asked his question, which would be better served if it were rephrased to say, What could make a man like Jean-Patrice Laconte, citizen of France, battle-scarred veteran of two wars, father of six, and friend of Robert de la Salle, construct a fort where it was all but impossible to kill your enemy as he advanced?

The answer is simple, and if Scipion saw this place as I see it today, I wonder if he wouldn’t rethink his question, or if he wouldn’t perhaps refrain from asking it at all. Arriving as he did so shortly after the battle, he could still see bloodstains on the grass and on the white bark of the trees where men caught trying to escape were bound and then executed. There were broken weapons, axes, muskets, discarded bits of ammunition, unpaired shoes lost while running, bits of torn cloth from shirts, pants caught on branches, and the sense of a great, heaving tragedy lingering in the air. Looked upon like that, it would be impossible to see this meadow as anything other than a graveyard in the waiting—a spot designated if not by divine providence, then at least by history for bloodshed and massacre.

It would have been different, though, when Jean-Patrice first arrived. It would have looked more like it does right now—a tranquil meadow on the edge of a forest within a short hike of a stream. It’s the kind of place that you want to lie down in the middle of and stare up into the sky with your head resting on the grass without thought or worry for this life or the next.

If Laconte had had more time, I’m sure he would have eventually gotten around to securing the fort better. Posts would have been built, a second interior defense would have been constructed, holes for guns and cannons would have been bored through those beautiful stone walls, and I’m sure no one who lived here would have slept so well again.

Stopping here at Fort Laconte was my father’s idea, but I’m certain that it was my mother who made the most of it. She had a way of lingering around objects, of fixing them in her gaze as if she could see into the very atoms of which they were made, and once having done so, come to a definitive answer as to their nature and their history. A couch, a wine glass, or a coffee table was merely the form that an object took—its visible public form, free and open to all. When I was a child my mother would sit in the living room for hours and stare at the furniture. She noticed a room in a way no one I have known since has. There were few things to consider—the green-and-brown-striped couch that my father often slept on, a dark brown reclining armchair that seemed to resemble an old, tired basset hound, complete with wrinkles and folds, and an Impressionist-like painting of what looked to be a wide old boulevard somewhere in Europe in the middle of a storm, which hung opposite the couch, on a wall that got little to no light during the day. These were her companions, and she knew them well. When I came home from school, more often than not I found her there, sitting quietly with her legs curled up underneath her, enmeshed in the silence and comfort of objects that she had neither bought nor chosen for herself. She had theories about who the previous owners of each object may have been, and they would come to her in visions that kept her company in ways both my father and I failed to.

“I think someone very fat used to own this couch,” she said to me once. She ran her hand along the middle cushion. “You see. Look here. See that.” That was how she spoke when excited by an idea—in short, declarative bursts, the tried-and-true pattern of immigrant speech.

“Only a very fat person could make it soft like that.” And she was right, the middle cushion was softer and did sag more than the rest, and if you looked closely, as she asked me to do, there was still the impression of a body sitting on it, or so she led me to believe.

“They must have been very old,” she added, and as a matter not of opinion but of fact, incontrovertible and without doubt.

I noticed afterward that she never sat in the middle of the couch, and that when on occasion a guest or two came to visit, she would wince, almost in pain, to see someone sitting there, particularly if they were heavyset, which most of the older women in our church who came to visit every now and then tended to be. She worried over the poor knees of the ghost of the middle cushion, who for her continued to feel the weight of this world even in death.

And so on the afternoon that my parents arrived at Fort Laconte, while my father slowly circled the fort, stopping carefully to read the historical notices nailed to the posts in the ground, my mother would have lingered around the edges, closer to the forest than to the fort, in order to get a more complete view of the scene before her. She would have searched out a quiet place to sit, somewhere near here, along the back walls, where a few of the stones have fallen, creating what appears to be a little network of benches to sit on. A stone like this one would have been perfect for her. Roughly three feet high with a relatively even, flat top—the lone stray of the broken wall. Someone, not her, of course, must have moved it here to this corner of the meadow. It seems to not belong to the fort at all, an accidental product of nature, sprung out of the ground like an errant tooth breaking through the surface. It’s the perfect place to sit. From here I can see the entire arrangement of the fort: its slightly less than perfect ninety-degree angles, its few remaining walls and the empty spaces where a stable and sleeping quarters were. You can make out the edges of the guard’s booth, and if you had a husband you were trying to hide from, you could see him coming from all sides. If all is quiet, and you strain your ears, you can make out the faint trickle of the spring that runs inside the forest.

Coming here she knew nothing about Fort Laconte—its creation or its bloody demise, which is not to say that she did not sense that something tragic had happened here. As she sat on the stone she tried to imagine what it might have been, running through a catalogue of seismic tragedies that seemed to occur somewhere every day. Her first instinct had been war, and while she knew that to be the proper answer, she indulged herself a bit longer and tried to picture the former inhabitants of Fort Laconte as victims of plague, famine, and then finally a tornado—a natural event that she had witnessed on television for the first time a few weeks ago. There had been flattened houses, uprooted trees lying in the middle of the road, and a few grainy images of a swirling dark gray mass descending from the sky like a finger pointing, in what seemed to be an almost godlike gesture, at what would survive and what would be tossed away. As she watched the footage on the news that evening, she thought she could almost hear the voice of the tornado as it leapt from roof to roof saying, “I’ll take you, and you, and yes, even you.”