A Twisted Ladder (61 page)

In fact, he found he loved the radio. It brought him amazing news such as the Intracoastal Waterway undertaking, a path of artificial and natural canals that ran from New Jersey to Florida, and around to Texas, a massive toll-free shipping channel that had been under construction since Rémi and Chloe were wed.

He was mystified when he realized that private civilian groups, not just the government, now occupied the radio waves. Rémi had heard that the radio stations would become available to private industry after the war, but he could not remember whether the war
was even over
. He had a vague memory of discussions of its coming to an end around the time he married Chloe, but that had been several years ago, and he could not well remember anything that happened outside the bramble in the interim.

At some point over the last year, Patrice had purchased a brand new radio with vacuum tube receivers. It could pick up signals from both Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and beyond. Rémi had previously not allowed the radio to play while he was nearby, as the sounds would send him into a tailspin of confusion, but now he was fascinated. He listened to news, music, editorial commentary, and even the Sunday night program that broadcast children’s stories, a favorite of Marie-Rose.

Indeed, Rémi was fascinated with the world around him. It felt as if he had been away on holiday for a very long time, or had slept for years like the mythical Rip van Winkle, awakening in a world he did not recognize. He was shocked to see his own reflection in the glass: His hair was unruly, he had lost more teeth, and he was sharply thin.

When he came across a chest full of relics from the Great War, he realized that his last surviving brother was dead. Tatie Bernadette informed him that it had happened nearly ten years ago, on the night he and Chloe were married.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Rémi asked her.

“Chloe told you,” Bernadette replied. “You don’t remember?”

It wasn’t so much that Rémi did not remember; he simply had not been listening.

Rémi, your brother is dead. You are the only LeBlanc now. You and your children. You are the sole heir. I have helped you
.

Chloe’s words had been a tiny filament in a vast tapestry of sights and sounds that enveloped him, most prominently the face and voice of Ulysses. Constant noise; constant distraction. And the more he struggled, he would slip further into that place. The place where the trees grew black and the earth wobbled beneath him when he walked, as if the weeds formed a blanket over water. The place where the indigents lived, drawing him away, deeper into the woodland of eternal night.

But the most amazing aspect of Rémi’s awakening was the presence of his children. Patrice, Guy and Gilbert, and little Marie-Rose seemed to spring to life before his very eyes. When Rémi was under Ulysses’s bewitchment, the children scuttled about his periphery like spring hatches over water. With his newfound clarity, they became little people to him, with individual personalities and boisterous manners, and they were thrilled to have his notice.

Indeed, it was Rémi’s pleasure to notice them, but he feared he might at any moment lose himself in Ulysses’s world again. And so he savored every hour. He tilled the fields of sugarcane with worshipful hands. He fished and trapped with his sons in the swollen river, for it was a wet year, and he listened, mesmerized, as Marie-Rose read aloud from her books, in both French and English.

And Patrice—sharp-witted and already a striking beauty—with Patrice he could converse through the night, until dawn misted the river. They discussed the radio programs, how the Johnson grass threatened the sugarcane crop, Rémi’s state of mind, the rumors of a bad flood year, anything and everything. She was now a young lady of fourteen, and though Rémi had lived in the same house as she, he had missed half her childhood. But Patrice was strong, wise beyond her years and with a baffling intelligence. She reminded Rémi so much of Chloe.

And in those weeks of awakening, Rémi longed for Chloe. Tatie Bernadette had told him that Chloe had gone to New Orleans to manage business affairs. She was in the habit of staying in the house on Toulouse where his brother used to live, and tending to the new distribution venture that had brought Terrefleurs back into financial buoyancy. And so, Rémi waited for Chloe to return. In the meantime he delighted in the company of his children and the serenity of Terrefleurs, which was, for the moment, innocent of her demons.

IT RAINED FREQUENTLY THAT
spring. Sometimes it came in the form of a violent deluge, sometimes a gentle shower. When it was the latter, the workers tended the fields as usual, well-accustomed to Louisiana rains, and Rémi worked alongside them. He listened and worked in time with the cadence Francois chanted. His hoe gouged the earth in rhythmic thrusts, keeping time, and the workers answered the leader’s call in one deep, unified voice.

But when the rains poured with intensity, the fields lay silent. The workers confined themselves to more domestic chores, making repairs on their own cottages, or telling tales and singing in the dining hall. Rémi was surprised to see that Chloe had outfitted even the workers’ cottages with indoor plumbing, another testament to the wealth she had brought Terrefleurs with her keen business sense. She had also greatly improved the plantation school so even the workers’ children, who could not afford to take the boat down the bayou to the school in Vacherie, were now well-learned.

How Rémi longed for Chloe, and wished she would return from New Orleans. With the rains confining him to the main house, he was left with little to do but think of her. And wonder how long before Ulysses would return.

What kind of life is this? Why do I bother?

It occurred to him that were it not for his wife and children, he wouldn’t.

RÉMI SPOKE WITH PATRICE
one afternoon as they sat in the shelter of the gallery while rain shrouded Terrefleurs in curtains of gray. He smoked tobacco while Patrice sipped her first taste of cherry bounce, though it seemed not a taste that agreed with her much.

Patrice told Rémi that her mother had expanded the distribution end of the business, and that she was routinely needed at the warehouse. Rémi listened and nodded, though he could not imagine what business matter would occupy Chloe so. He also noticed a hint of bitterness in his daughter’s voice. He realized that the children must have been lonely with an absent mother and father, being raised instead by a nanny and tutors. He explained to Patrice that he himself had gone away to France for his education, and he knew how alone Patrice must feel at times.

Patrice shrugged with apparent indifference. “As I see it, Tatie Bernadette is my mother, and as for you, well, you are here now, at least.”

Rémi was surprised and disturbed.

“Your mother loves you very much, Patrice. She has saved this plantation from financial ruin. The only reason she has not been here with her children is because she is working hard to keep Terrefleurs strong.”

Without turning her face to him, Patrice looked at her father from the corner of her eyes, and then focused again on the drumming rain.

“Is that the only reason, Papa? How can you know that? Don’t you know that to her, you are no more than a pigeon in the garden?”

He did not answer, for his thoughts were captured by the wailing sound of cadence drifting from the avenue of field workers’ cottages.

“Listen to that!” he laughed. “They are calling cadence in this storm! They must be working together on something.”

He peered out toward the small cottages, but could only see dim shapes behind the sheets of water. “Fixing somebody’s house, maybe.”

Patrice smiled but knit her brows. “What’s cadence?”

“Have you not ever gone to play out by the fields?”

The rain hissed all around, and just beneath it came the lone voice, sounding off in rhythmic Creole.

Rémi gestured toward the sound. “Cadence is the songs we sing while we work. There is a leader, and he sets the pace, and the rest answer back. It keeps the work going, and everyone moves together.” He shrugged. “It makes the time go by.”

“Oh, I have heard that,” she said, narrowing her eyes blindly into the curtain of gray.

Thunder crackled and obscured all other sounds.

“I just thought those were songs.” She shook her head dreamily, not being accustomed to the effect the cherry bounce had on her young constitution. “I don’t hear anything, Papa.”

The atmospheric rumble continued, and when it passed, Rémi strained to listen beyond the rain. But the singing had stopped, and now he heard nothing but the pattern of rain and occasional bursts of thunder.

THE NEXT DAY THE
rain continued with the same intensity, and again the field workers could not tend the cane. As Rémi and the children gathered around the radio in the late afternoon, his head turned once again toward the call of cadence from the field workers’ cottages. He listened to the rhythmic Creole words, but the babble of the radio interrupted and gave him a headache.

He excused himself early and went to bed. The taunting cadence droned through the afternoon and all through the night. When the rooster crowed at dawn, he was still lying awake, listening to the ceaseless rise and fall of the field worker’s voice. His body lay tense with dread.

Grim-faced, he rose and opened the door, stepping out onto the gallery where the drizzle had stopped and the engorged black body of the Mississippi rushed beyond. He circled the gallery to the rear of the house that looked over the field workers’ row. A lone figure stood in the center of the avenue, working the mud with a hoe and calling out into the dawn with the working man’s poetry.

Ulysses.