Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans (23 page)

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 God.”

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 Carré, 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
father, too. Wasn’t he entitled 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 passed.

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 hitched 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 cocked 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, feckless brother to save his life. The dusk-gray eyes brimmed with gratitude. 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 passed and John Michel listened in vain for his son’s hearty laugh, the wail of a brass 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 passed, 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
. 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
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 passed 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.

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.