Reverend America: A Journey of Redemption (22 page)

He paused for a moment, wishing to himself that Hermione had left something to Angelike. But looking around at the faces of the gathered, he saw she’d left something to them all. She’d deeded the land rights to her foundation and left with it a fighting fund to resist the oil company if need be—and the Disney interests. She’d looked after her family as best she could—from the woodpeckers and the terrapins, even to wizened Mrs. Nedd.

“Today,” he continued . . . “Is another chance to appreciate the wisdom of chance. I think if Hermione had met Angelike, after all the years in between—if she knew about the baby . . . it just would’ve been harder for her to do what she felt she had to do.

“I never got to meet her, but standing here on this little island that was important to her, I feel the presence of a life well lived—not death. I see her life reflected in the faces gathered here now. I think her timing was as it needed to be . . . and she’s left a legacy to help carry on the work she lived for, and to look out for the lives of others. Like the trees, we can clap our hands. Like the birds, we can sing . . . because it’s natural to do so.”

A gravel-throated Hoptree Bark launched into a scratchy yet still clear rendition of “Across the Waters,” which brought Angelike to tears. They weren’t tears of grief—they were almost happy—the recognition that this was indeed a fitting end—even noble.

Casper recalled the lyrics to the hymn like some ghostly lullaby and started singing along, harmonizing with the old man without even trying. If the tune was melancholy, the mood of the assembled wasn’t . . . and certainly not the rambunctious percussion of the unseen bird, which though faint and mingled with the flow of the water, seemed near enough to hold in hand. When the last tones had faded out, they gave Hermione a cypress wood cross, and Merrit left one of his prize garden statue frogs on guard to protect her spirit.

After the burial, Ananda produced a smoked catfish to share amongst the mourners. It was a small enough cat as it was and then Link Duquette and his cousin showed up—and Valentine Tate motored Odessa Pepper out to pay her respects and to be near Hoptree just in case one of the bonne a ríennes or “no-account wimmen” got any ideas. Casper took the fish and managed to serve everyone, which was a minor miracle and then they left Hermione to her island—all except for Link who was hung over from rotgut and had fallen asleep.

When they arrived back at Roy’s and had off-loaded Angelike, Mrs. Nedd and the rest, Hoptree sought out Casper for a confidential throaty word, although Casper thought it may have been to avoid Mrs. Nedd.

“Mighty nice eulogy,” the old man coughed. “You’re a natural.”

“Nothing natural about it,” Casper shrugged. He consoled himself for the swindles of yesteryear by recalling that he’d always believed he was doing some good, telling some truth.

“No,” Hoptree insisted, shaking his silver head. “You’ve got a gift. It’s like singing in tune. You can’t fake it—at least not in person. Folks can hear it right away. You speak with authority. You’ve been places . . . seen things. You know things.”

“A lot I wish I didn’t,” Casper replied, thinking back to the Oldsmobile and Rick James. So many dreams and nightmares.

“We all can say the same,” the old man answered. “But you can speak to people so they’ll listen. I can tell you were a preacher—but I know for damn certain you’re a leader.”

Casper made a sound that wasn’t quite a word.

“You may balk at that like a white donkey,” Hoptree frowned. “But you can’t run away from it like the other things you’ve been running from son . . . no matter who’s chasing you.”

Casper got stuck on that word “son.” He knew it was just an expression, but it occurred to him that as nutty as Hoptree was, he was as close to a father figure as he’d had since Joe, and a lot more peaceful. Hoptree was summer breeze by comparison. Even if his mind did go kite flying.

“You’re feeling better,” Casper said.

“I am,” the old man acknowledged. “Did I cause any problems?”

“Nothing that couldn’t be explained.”

Hoptree chuckled. “I feel I should be ashamed—but I’m not. I remember the tornado . . . and squabbling with Little Miss. And wishing I had a sombrero.”

“You took a nasty knock when that kid collided with you—worse than the tree.”

“Who?” the old man asked, feeling his lump.

“Shelby. The matador’s little friend.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t remember, Austin? The crazy matador? Angelike’s ex-uncle?”

“Nope,” said the old man. “Was he talking about fossils?”

“
You
 were talking about fossils,” Casper replied. “What 
do
 you remember?”

“The funeral.”

“And before that?”

“Odessa.”

“Good. And you remember the twister.”

“What twister?”

“You just said you remembered it!”

“When was that?”

“Never mind—what else do you remember. Before Odessa.”

“Growing up in Birdsong, Mississippi.”

“You said you grew up in Pennsylvania.”

“Actually, I didn’t grow up in either place—although I sort of did in both.”

Here we go again thought Casper.

“You see . . . ” the old man said. “I 
was
 born in Birdsong, Mississippi. But I never lived there. I took the spirit of the place in by osmosis.”

“I don’t understand,” Casper said, hoping this might lead somewhere he could.

“My father was an unusual man,” Hoptree said, scratching his scraggly chin. “By the way, I hate to tell you—I’m not 151 years-old. Although I’m pretty sure Mrs. Nedd is—and then some. Jesus, her breath!”

Casper almost grinned. “I’m glad we cleared that up. How old are you really? 149?”

“You’ll be disappointed to learn I’m in this wretched condition at the still innocent vintage of 89 last birthday. Just old enough to be a fool and a liar, not wise enough to be good at either. But I’m working on it. And I wasn’t kidding to Missy about the erection.”

“So you remember that?”

“Son, you get to a certain point and you remember every erection. I think Ben Franklin said that. And you sure as hell remember every chance you get to use one—I said that.”

Casper almost laughed. It struck him as rather wonderful, the old man’s childlike acceptance of the situation they were in now. Maybe their arrival on the bayou made more sense having been on an extensive imaginary tour of the American Museum of Natural History. It couldn’t have been any more confusing at least. “What were you saying about your father?”

“What was I saying? Oh, yes. Both my parents were unusual. Both of them came from money, or at least culture. My father was an investment banker in New York. We lived in a brownstone near Gracie Square. But they were outsiders in their social circles. What he loved—and my mother too—was music. Not hifalutin music—down to earth stuff. They got out of Manhattan every chance they could—collecting music and song material. Old ballads, cowboy songs, field hollers, church stomps and spirituals. Like John and Alan Lomax.”

“Who?”

“Famous musicologists. Father and son. They collected songs for the Library of Congress. Visited ranches and rodeos, prison farms and levee camps. They discovered Lead Belly. My parents made some discoveries of their own. Nobody quite as famous, but a lot of good stuff . . . children’s game chants . . . chain gang rhythms. They went down to the old turpentine camps. They began collecting fragments of sheet music left by traveling black preachers—a mix of early blues, old hymns and hybrid songs these fellows—and one or two women too—wrote. They were called the Only Men and my folks put together a songbook of their work so it wouldn’t be lost forever. Their dream was to start their own phonograph record company. Oxcart Records. That’s what led them to Birdsong. There was an old mulatto man living there. Played a cardboard guitar and a bunch of instruments he’d made himself. Half Delta plantation Negro, half hillbilly—with Tennessee whiskey and Indian war paint for blood. He claimed to be the last living Only Man. He called himself Hoptree Bark, which is why I later took to calling myself that in his honor.”

“What happened to your parents?” Casper asked, deciding not to ask his old friend what his real name was, and to say nothing about what he knew of the Only Men.

The old man shook his head. “Their dreams never came true. Everything went to hell in a hand basket when the Great Depression hit. The first Great Depression I should say. You’ve heard about the Wall Street men jumping off window ledges because they were ruined? Well, not all of them jumped. Some of ‘em got pushed.”

“Your father was pushed—out a window?”

“Folks were angry. Just like in more recent times, lots of people thought the fancy pants financiers got everyone into the shit. Of course nobody took any responsibility themselves. However it happened, dad ended up splattered on the cobblestones and any hope of Oxcart Records went with him. Broke and widowed, my mother had a nervous collapse. Tried to drown herself in the bathtub the day she let the servants go. Our maid was just leaving when she found what had happened. Mother survived, but she was taken away to what was called then a ‘Ladies Refuge’ on Long Island. A loony bin with azaleas. Her parents still had some money and foot the bill for a while. But then they died and she ended up in much less pleasant conditions upstate in Elmira, which is where she passed—alone, living on charity, out of her mind.”

“What happened to you?” Casper asked.

“That’s a damn good question, son. Whenever I can remember, I ask it all the time. Short answer is I was taken in by aunts in Rochester—and they raised me well, although they were both much older than my parents and not in very good health. They encouraged my interest in music. They bought me a Cleveland Greyhound trumpet—that was my main instrument at first—before I started plinking the ivories. I played the “Star Spangled Banner” at Niagara Falls once. Then they died within a month of each other and I was put in an orphanage, and after that a church run place for boys.”

Casper couldn’t find the right words to respond. They stood in silence for a moment, staring out over the dock. The sky had gone the color of dried bone and the air was thick with female rain scent.

“For reasons that escape me now, but I’m pretty sure had something to do with a young tart named Milly, I made it out to Pennsylvania the moment I was old enough to hit the road on my own,” the old man said.

“The trumpet got hocked, and I’ve grieved about that ever since—but I’d switched over to the guitar when my aunts died, because I didn’t have regular access to a piano anymore. I played in bars and on street corners. Milly ran off with a carnival showman who passed through. I took to drinking and moping—I think I slept in a kindling box one summer. But there was work to be had around those parts then, if you didn’t mind the thought of getting killed for it. When I got too skinny for my clothes I decided I better make some money. I got a job in the mines and started singing folk songs at worker’s rallies . . . got involved in the labor movement, became a socialist and then a communist . . . got my head kicked in a few times. Those affiliations and my eyesight, which wasn’t so good even back then, kept me out of the War—and in some ways I feel cheated about that—that might’ve been the last war fought in good conscience.

“But it didn’t take me long to work out that singing about coal mines was a lot better than working in ‘em. You start to hear timbers creaking and get a whiff of tunnel gas in your sleep—wake up in a cold sweat. So I left the pits and began a life as a folk singer. Didn’t turn out half-bad at first. I lived in the Village in New York. Played with Pete Seeger and Josh White. I wanted to meet Woody Guthrie, but he’d been institutionalized by then. Got married—had two kids.

“Then the communist connections got me for real, just when things were looking good. Ruined my career, and I crawled into a bottle for a decade and lost my family. I dropped my bundle, son. Shameful. Spent ten blank years as a bum in a drunk tank or in a psych ward. Ten years I could’ve been making music. I’m afraid it’s the music I missed the most. I was never much good as a father.”

Casper somehow doubted that. “What happened to your family,” he asked.

“No idea about my wife. She left us all. My daughter I fear went the same way as young Missy. Lost all contact ages ago. My son went the other way and became a proud, cruel version of my father—just without the love of music or anything other than himself. Still, I have to admit he at least tracked me down. He was the one who got me into that fishbowl where you found me. I’d bought a place in Ardmore years ago when I had some money—a bolt hole. Played there once in a band and liked the town—although it’s a real good place for not ever mentioning Karl Marx. When things fell apart, I went back and taught music there for years—never played again professionally. Trouble was I outlived two more wives and all my friends. Then I fell for this mail sting—some con artists. Lost my house, started mumbling and kite flying and my son put me in the home. Home! The money went faster than the time though. Then he had a heart attack at his big desk. I think they’d have put me out on the street if that twister and you hadn’t happened by.”

“What twister?” Casper asked.

“You’re learning, son,” the old man winked through his cataracts.

Just then Merrit blundered out of the trailer huffing and ribbiting as if the place was on fire. “Scweehd gunna harvit! Schwoon! Aswayby! Thawayby!”

They were finally made to understand that Angelikes’s contractions had started. Ananda had dispatched Merrit to borrow Delanor Berube’s fast power boat (which had been impounded in a drug raid and bought by the crawfisherman at auction with money he’d made drug smuggling). Casper found the young girl cursing, “Feels like I gotta shit a basketball!”

Ananda wheeled Mrs. Nedd over to talk to the boar head. Hoptree they left in the care of Odessa. Then Merrit churned the water into froth as live oak, boscoyo and ibis flew past—so fast none of them noticed the other boat that had slipped out from behind Woodpecker Island just in time to see them leaving the dock. A familiar boat, but with a stranger on board. A strange looking stranger at that.

Angelike was breathing erratically, in a lot of pain. Casper and Ananda were busy trying to reassure her—so they didn’t see the old moss-slick crawdadder with a Johnson 20 bolted on the back, which Luiz Ramirez kept tied up beside his mud dauber shack. Naturally they didn’t see the man in it—who’d just scared the bejesus out of a sodden Link Duquette—and who before that had left Luiz Ramirez lying in a pile of yellow-tailed shad with a large knot on his head. But he saw them. Their wake was easy to trace and there were only so many channels the bigger craft could navigate. Enrique squeezed his right hand white on the throttle—his mind a jungle.

Emily Dickinson’s clinic was an overgrown motel built back in 1969 for oil and gas workers of the Evolution Oil Company. The highlight was the ruin of a four-lane bowling alley now festooned with lewd orchids. An entire wing had been smothered in kudzu and wild grape. But the rooms where Ananda led Angelike, with the help of Casper, were as clean and white as Emily Dickinson could make them, with a table laid out in waiting, with an extension for stirrups.

Dish-faced, carob-skinned and petite, the former Crescent City R.N. had been born on the bayou and was unstintingly pragmatic, whether examining a prostate, irrigating a wound or landing a largemouth bass. Ananda was relieved to find her in residence, as emergencies often called her away.

Hooker Barr, who’d lost four fingers to a drill rig and had turned to drinking a kind of moonshine you could burn in a Coleman stove, sat waiting to be tested for diabetes, while Altana Celine paced, waiting for a boil on her butt the size of a crab shell to be lanced. Emily Dickinson took one look at Angelike and put her two other patients on hold. “Good Lord, girl—you cain’t hide that! Come on in here where I can lookatchya.”

Angelike seemed calmed by the quick hands of the light skinned black woman, who began easing her out of her clothes, and mopping her face. “You the father?” she asked Casper, who was at a loss for words. It didn’t matter. Emily Dickinson was one of those women who believed that when it comes to giving birth, men only get in the way—and she scooted him out the door so she could deal with the situation in the sacred company of her own sex.

Father? He felt like a child again. This may have been an eerily similar version of his own arrival into the world. Young desperate mother . . . fear . . .

Casper waited outside with Merrit (who thankfully had gone quiet), catching occasional yeaks of pain from Angie and remonstrances from Ananda and Emily Dickinson to keep breathing and push, push! The sky was metallic, the wind rising, carrying the distinctive smell of southern Louisiana where it’s never certain where the Gulf ends and the so-called land begins.

Enrique pulled in above the motel, hidden by trees, hallucinating a slithering mass of liquid green reptiles between him and his money. He shoved the barrel of the Luger down his pants and felt his sweaty little penis begin to stiffen. An egret creaked from a branch into the chalk air.

Casper heard a terrible cry from Angelike—then a series of distressed exclamations from Ananda—followed by one from Emily Dickinson. She emerged wearing latex gloves coated with blood, hollering for her son Myron, who banged out of the manager’s residence like a muscular 13 year-old version of Cameron Blanchard’s son Goodricke. Despite his thick glasses, he gave the impression of being a good shot with a .410. His mother gave him some instructions Casper couldn’t hear and the boy ran back to the office.

“Gawdd! Gimme some fuckin’ druggs!” the young mother screamed.

There was more yelling. Angelike yowled in agony and the door was shut again. Then opened. The sense of panic seemed to grow. Casper’s heart pounded. Emily Dickinson made a phone call to the hospital in Lafayette. Something had gone wrong. Casper heard Angelike crying. He was paralyzed, listening to a scared young girl trying to give birth to a baby that he suspected was already dead.

“It’s a boy!” he heard Ananda say—but there was nothing from Emily Dickinson—and then muffled panting from the distressed mother. Casper had a bad feeling. Angelike called out. He could tell Ananda was holding her down, shushing her.

“Wanna see ma baby!” she grunted. “Wanna see my son!”

“Quiet, honey. You gotta rest easy,” Casper heard Emily Dickinson say.

A moment later she emerged with a look on her face he hoped to never see again. It was there for just an eye blink—a radiance of such sorrow and compassion. She handed him a bundle, her gloved hands glistening with gore. Angelike was hemorrhaging. The baby was dead. She wasn’t to know just yet.

Merrit had gone off by the boat. Casper appreciated that. He couldn’t have opened the thin sopping blanket with anyone else looking on. Even so it was almost a minute before he had the courage to look—the baby some Lonely Room part of himself wished had been his—and what also seemed to be a broken mirror reflection of his own life.

But it wasn’t. He was born whiter than white—alive. This child was black, and stillborn. A tiny face like an alien Buddha. The bump. He thought back to Suzanne’s bizarre doll in Indianapolis and stowed the bundle out of sight, trying to wipe his hands.

The door opened again and Emily Dickinson came out and called for Myron. A moment later, Ananda and Myron emerged carrying Angelike on a stretcher. The girl was wrapped up like a mummy, just her head poking out. She looked so small and tired—worse than tired.

“Lissen . . . I—I give ‘im a name,” she choked. “Casper.”

“That’s a good name,” Casper said, trying hard to smile, wondering what she suspected, what she knew.

“Could—could he have—yore lass name—too?” she whispered, her breath like dead leaves. “If—if I doan come back—?”

“You’ll come back.”

“You lie. You’ll look—take care of ‘im?”

“He’ll be fine here until you come back.”

“But you’ll look after ‘im?” she choked.

“Yes,” Casper answered. “You have faith, all right?”

“You look after ‘im . . . an’ you—you give ‘em that belt I got—that snakeskin belt—you—that belt . . . ”

“Yes,” Casper said.

“Remember me.”

Emily Dickinson had called on the bayou telegraph to get Odessa’s son to fly out in a pontoon helicopter to take Angelike into the hospital in Lafayette. Emily Dickinson knew when to fold and cut her losses. The girl had major complications—but there was still a chance seeing that she was young and tough. Just a chance. “But she needs the hope of that chile,” Emily Dickinson warned Casper as the copter appeared. “And I doan want you to worry ‘bout the money. I got a favor to call in in a big pinch—and this is a pinch.”

Casper tried to nod as an emotional Ananda patted his hand. “Personne sait ce que demain amène, pas meme demain lui-même.” He didn’t understand what she said, but he knew what she meant.

The helicopter’s rotary drone stirred the birds and trees—and churned up the water, attracting the attention of something big that had been swimming in the bayou close by. It solved the problem of Enrique Cruz—who didn’t end up killing Angelike and regaining his money.

Resigning any hope of his diabetes test that day, Hooker Barr and the 300 pound Seminole woman he’d met when he was gatoring in Ft. Myers set off to lay some new trap lines, just as the matador was sneaking around the back of the old motel to break into the clinic and accost poor Angelike. The sight of the hefty Indian and the man with the mangled hand put Enrique in mind to steal back to where he’d hidden Luiz’s boat and wait until they were gone. Then, just as he was cursing himself purple, the helicopter came and he had no choice but to slip into the water to hide until they’d taken off.

Over the whizzing thud of the blades he didn’t hear the swoosh in the slow stream, and was never seen again. Perhaps the Murker, not having been satisfied with the meal of the chicken executive, needed to feed once more. Perhaps something else happened. But Enrique Cruz disappeared from Louisiana without anyone ever knowing he was there or why (for his Caddy was boosted later that day by a couple of kids from St. Martinville), leaving behind only the unsolved attack on Luiz. So it often happens in life. Sometimes great calamities are averted without us even knowing they were a threat—our attention always focused on the apparent crisis at hand, innocents on the periphery taking a blow meant for us.