“That’s all?” Keaton asked.
“What’s in the box?” Macon asked.
“Paint,” Ella stammered.
“Paint?” Macon said.
Samuel handed the box to Ella. “We got to head on. We’ll be late for school.”
“He just left?” Keaton said. “He just up and left without telling us bye?”
“Is he coming back?” Macon asked and then pulled the box lower so he could get a look inside.
“No,” Samuel said. “He won’t be coming back.”
“He just left without saying anything to anybody?” Keaton looked back down at the spot where Lanier had slept.
Ella let Macon hold the box of paints and then looked straight at Samuel. “It’s for the best.”
“Samuel was right,” Keaton said, kicking the spot where Lanier had slept. “He’s nothing but white trash.”
“Mind what you say about Lanier,” Ella said.
“He’s still our friend,” Macon said, looking up at Ella for reassurance. She pulled him close to the fold of her underarm but didn’t reply.
“It’s for the best,” Samuel said and handed the money to Ella. When his fingers brushed up against hers, Ella squeezed them before he had a chance to pull away.
Standing alone at the barn door, Ella watched her sons disappear into the fog and make their way to school. She clutched the box of paint to her chest and heard Lanier in her mind.
“Let the art free your mind.”
Rubbing the surface of the plywood box, Ella felt she was drowning in the darkness that she pictured as a yoke around her soul. She imagined herself walking into the mist and folding inside the empty feeling that tormented her until she would eventually vanish.
She thought of her aunt and the way she would often wrap her arms around herself and shudder. “I’m just so nervous and melancholy today,” her aunt would say. Ella would quietly walk about the house and peer into the bedroom where her aunt rested during bright spring days with the drapes completely drawn. Her aunt had spent so much of her life behind closed curtains. A shiver ran down Ella’s spine, and she forced herself to step out of the barn and into the damp mist that covered the air. The time for tears had come and gone. “It’s for the best,” she said twice more before forcing herself to take one step and then another back to the house.
A late-September thunderstorm swept over New Orleans and broke the heat wave that had left the French Quarter cooking in a brew of bodily fluids and alcohol that heavied the air. Lanier welcomed the momentary relief that came with the rain. The one-bedroom flat that he rented in the brick row home with the broken black lamp above the door lacked ventilation. It was owned by Miss Prideaux, a mulatto woman with a red mole above her right eye. Her dark skin made the spot look more like a ruby on the Indian women Lanier saw in one of the heavy books he studied at the library. She would hear none of Lanier’s comparisons. “I’m 100 percent French, or I’m nothing at all,” Miss Prideaux said.
Mr. Pelham, an aging illustrator with a yellow-tinged goatee, sold silhouette drawings to the people who passed by his stand at Jackson Square. The old man told Lanier that Miss Prideaux was a prostitute. In turn, Miss Prideaux whispered to Lanier in the courtyard where dead banana leaves were embedded into the broken pebbles that Mr. Pelham had come to her doorstep from an insane asylum. It was fitting, Lanier thought. For so long back in Georgia with the Troxlers, he had worried about his reputation and his associations. Now he had no reputation whatsoever.
Mr. Pelham’s stand was right next to the one Lanier set up just to the right of St. Louis Cathedral. Most days he would share po-boy sandwiches with Mr. Pelham, but he never consumed his gossip. Lanier had found his niche carving dolls and wooden puppets, complete with playful expressions and strings that controlled their every move. The less he said, the better off he’d be. A woman from the Garden District whose husband was the head of the Cotton Exchange had bought dolls for every room in her home, for friends who had given social favors, and even for her maids. She spread the word about his wares. Those below her on the social rungs quickly followed her example. Soon Lanier was so busy that he was able to trim back his hours at the United Fruit Company, where he unloaded cases marked with exotic seals from Cuba, Argentina, and Hawaii. He preferred the stench of the Quarter to the smell of the rotting fruit on the deck.
Walking back to his flat on Burgundy Street, Lanier watched as a woman with a low-cut top dropped a bucket down on a rope from a second-story window. A boy not more than twelve with a wool cap turned sideways placed a sack with a loaf of bread sticking out of it into the bucket. The woman held on to the rope and yelled down, “You got the gin in there?” The boy hit the side of the bucket with his hand and nodded. Lanier stood against the street post and watched the boy saunter away with his hands in his pockets. There was something about his gait and the way that he turned his head to the side like he was contemplating an important idea that caused Lanier to think of Keaton. Then, just as easily, his mind drifted to Ella. He shook his head as if he could dislodge the memory of her and walked across the street.
Lanier unlocked the iron door that led to the courtyard of Miss Prideaux’s boardinghouse. He could make out an argument behind the door at the end, the peeling door with a one-eared lion’s head as a doorknocker. The couple in that room had moved in two weeks ago, after the man had been discharged from the Army. From all appearances, he battled the bottle as much as he did the ability to walk on one leg.
Juggling the croaker sack filled with the dolls and puppets he had failed to sell that day, Lanier looked up in time to see Miss Prideaux on the ledge above him. Her long hair hung over her shoulder, and her left leg was propped up on the top of the iron railing. Soap covered the bottom part of her leg, and the evening sun caught the tip of the silver straight razor that she held. “Sell anything?” Miss Prideaux asked just like she did every day.
No, have you?
Lanier thought but didn’t ask. He smiled and shrugged with the bag slung over his shoulder. “You know, a little here and a little there.” If she heard him, Miss Prideaux gave no indication. She just slowly dragged the blade across her shin and bit the tip of her tongue.
His room was made up of a bed, a broken desk, and an olive-colored sofa with horsehair spilling out from a tear. Lanier retreated into his imagination the way he had ever since coming to New Orleans. He had made the mistake of being an open book once and would not make it again. Besides, it had to be this way. Life had dictated it. It was for the best.
Opening the pages of a novel about a woman striking out on her own to California, he read the description of the woman three times. He was determined to read the books that the librarian, a man with a missing tooth in the front and a speckled nose, told him were worthwhile. But this book had been more than an obstacle. It had been a trigger for bad feelings that he no longer had the discipline to shove aside. No matter how many times Lanier read the description of the New York woman and tried to see her as a redhead or a blonde, he kept seeing her the way she was presented, a woman with dark hair and iris-colored eyes. A woman like Ella.
Ella clouded his sleeping hours as much as she did his daydreams at Jackson Square. Often he dreamed the same visions. He would see her in the square, circling the vendors, wearing a hat covered in purple peacock feathers. She turned her head and smiled that pouty way she had, but her eyes never fell upon him. She was looking just to the right, where Mr. Pelham drew illustrations of human faces. In those dreams Lanier would leave his wares and fight through the crowd to reach her. Bobbling in the crowd, Ella would never stay in one place. She would only smile and cast her eyes about the people as if she were looking for someone other than him. And like always, he would awake gasping for breath and hearing the sounds of the French Quarter beyond his open window: a scream of ecstasy or fear, a fading trumpet, a bottle breaking, or a couple fighting. He never once heard the sad sound of the whip-poor-will that seemed to own the night air at Ella’s farm.
By the time the sky in Dead Lakes transitioned from the pink of late summer to the lighter blue-green that heralded cooler nights, the main lobby of Brother Mabry’s retreat was complete. He had gladly signed the lease Ella had proposed and then set forth clearing a road that would allow his wife Priscilla to lounge in the spring at leisure. “I own the land,” Ella said to him on more than one occasion. “You’re free to build your center, but you’ll lease the land. That land stays in my name.” To ensure safeguards of her privacy, Samuel was on hand the day the stone fence was erected around the spring, verifying that none of the pilgrims who would come from points unknown would encroach on their way of life. But in spite of good intentions and careful oversight, life was never completely the same.
A gravel road replaced the red-dirt one that ran in front of the store. Iron gates marked the entrance to Eden. A comfortable sixty-room lodge made out of virgin pine and Georgia marble was the place that gave comfort to those in search of a cure. The faithful lounged in hospital chairs around the spring that never changed temperature and prayed with Brother Mabry’s associate staff of seven.
By early October the newspapers had lost interest in Brother Mabry’s crusade and had busied themselves with the business of tracking the end of the war and the flu that was sweeping across the Northeast.
In the most severe cases, the influenza was leading to pneumonia. In search of cures if not protection, the wealthy of southern New York, where Priscilla had social and financial ties, spent days traveling to Apalachicola. Their trunks lined the docks as colored boys eager to make a quarter stood in a line to take care of their traveling needs.
Mr. and Mrs. Pomeroy’s son, Zach, came home from the war after spending time in a New Jersey military hospital for burn wounds to his lower torso. “If only that man was still here,” Mrs. Pomeroy said in the store. “I know he could do Zach some good, like he did with that colored girl. Do you ever hear from him?”
Ella glanced at the string puppet shaped and painted like Uncle Sam that had arrived from New Orleans in a fruit crate. She handed Mrs. Pomeroy her change and pointed out a two-for-one sale on sponges at the opposite end of the store.
Reverend Simpson preached his sermons as if Ella had never leased her property to the acclaimed evangelist. The only difference was that now Ella and her sons occupied the back pew from time to time. Bonaparte collected oysters from Apalachicola Bay and sold them to the head chef at Brother Mabry’s retreat. Neva Clarkson taught Macon his times tables, and Keaton mapped out the state capitals. He could better relate to the locations in the Northeast from having met some of the citizens of those states. The sojourners came into the store chattering about the quaintness of the locale and the freshness in the air that empowered their lungs. At the time, most everything in Dead Lakes seemed to have stayed the same—at least that was what the locals told themselves without ever speaking to the fresh supply of Eden seekers who arrived at Brother Mabry’s iron gates in a bus with his name on the side of it.
“I need a bottle of aspirin,” Mrs. Pomeroy said on one autumn afternoon. “Zach’s running a fever. I can’t keep it down, and the doctor is at a loss. If only that man was still around.” Mrs. Pomeroy pulled at her sweater. She looked up at Ella with hopeful curiosity.
Ella waved her hand in the air, wanting to dismiss Mrs. Pomeroy as much as her reference of Lanier. “Miss Potter said everybody in Apalachicola is down with it too,” Ella said. “Just a bug, more or less. It’ll pass.” Ella didn’t mention how Brother Mabry’s dire predictions of plagues and Myer Simpson’s first report of the flu months earlier had caused her now to wonder, if not worry. It was a fleeting thought, but just the same, it was there. Maybe Lanier had brought curses to the town.
Ella waited until Mrs. Pomeroy had left before she turned back to the Panama City newspaper. The lead story was about a funeral parlor in Philadelphia that couldn’t buy caskets fast enough. By that evening Ella’s teacher from days gone by, Miss Wayne, was dead from pneumonia. Three days later, the Pomeroys would buy a casket for their son, Zach. “He fought a war in some blasted place I can’t even pronounce, but he got taken by the flu,” Mr. Pomeroy yelled at Reverend Simpson during the wake held in the parlor of the Pomeroy home. “What kinda God is that?”
Brother Mabry called the citizens of Franklin County together in a prayer rally. People showed up at his Eden with handkerchiefs tied around their mouths. Inside the cathedral with its shiny ceiling made from cypress wood and its amber-colored glass windows as tall as a man, if anyone sneezed they were escorted out by one of the elders who wore matching green suspenders.
“Jesus said if we have enough faith we can move mountains,” Brother Mabry said and pulled at the button of his crimson velvet jacket. “But enough faith is the key. Hear me now. . . . If . . .
if
we have enough faith, we can pray down this flu.” The crowd grew silent when Priscilla stood up in the front row that had been quarantined by red ropes that kept everyone else two pews away from her. She reached up her hand like she might be testifying to all that Brother Mabry spoke. A trickle of blood ran from her nose and fell to the stone floor. Without so much as letting go of her handkerchief, she collapsed. The crowd scattered outside as she was cradled away in Brother Mabry’s massive arms. Guests quickly changed into their long swimsuits and sectioned off to the gender-specific bathing areas at the spring. Water splashed and the faithful proclaimed protection.
When the pool of water failed to keep the first victim in Eden, a twenty-three-year-old woman from Greenwich with hazel eyes too big for her face, from catching the influenza that turned her milky-colored skin black, the faithful couldn’t find enough colored boys to lug their trunks back onto the steamboats that would lead them home.
The day after Priscilla’s body was embalmed and packed in a crate for burial at her family’s New York estate, Brother Mabry stood on the bow of the
John W. Callahan
steamboat with a handkerchief monogrammed with his initials tied around his face. He watched the land that he once believed to be his spiritual homeland drift farther away. As the warehouses that lined the dock became nothing more than dots on the horizon, he took off his velvet jacket and tossed it in the wind. The crimson-colored coat landed on the cresting waves, the wide sleeves outstretched the same way they would be if they were filled by the arms of a drowned man.
In New Orleans the flu that the papers had declared an epidemic showed no boundaries. The wealthy of the Garden District were struck down with the same force as those who lived in what many considered to be the slums of the French Quarter. People stayed away from Jackson Square and took refuge in the bars as much as they did in the churches.
Lanier walked through the cobblestoned alley that led to his rented room. At the end of the damp, littered space, a cat with eyes that seemed bigger than its bony head clawed through a box of trash. The cat moaned in a gurgled way that caused Lanier to stop. Then, before he could take another step, he saw the wagon of the undertaker pass. Bodies were stacked in the back of the wagon the same haphazard way that he had stacked logs back at Ella’s place. A child’s hand hung over the tailgate of the wagon. The blackish-blue hand flopped about as if it were waving. Turning away, Lanier quickly walked back to Jackson Square.
Inside the church, Lanier sat on the edge of the back pew and watched the faithful light candles, make the sign of the cross, and kneel. The faithful stream of attendees, usually old women with lace around their heads, had become a sea of people from different classes and ages. A young boy touched the foot of the statue of Jesus that stood in the corner while a man about Lanier’s age cried in front of the Virgin Mary. Lanier looked up at the main altar, where candles cast a yellow glow around the crucifix. The thorns on Jesus’ head and the blood around His forehead and ribs seemed brighter than before.
By his stripes we are healed.
Lanier knelt on the pad in front of his pew and wrestled with feelings of betrayal. The words of his grandmother, a woman with strands of coarse gray hair that dangled over her right eye, echoed in his mind.
“It’s a gift. If you was to ever tell the words that we speak over them that needs healing, then you ain’t fitting to have it. The Lord will take that gift from you because you squandered it away to man.”
He wanted to walk right through the church doors and run. To run and hide in the bushes. To keep his eyes turned away from the houses that had black ribbons tied around their doorknobs, indicating the places where the flu had visited. Lanier thought of his son and the hand of the child he had seen in the back of the death wagon. He wanted to run out into the night and inhale with all his might. He wanted to run as much as he wanted to die.