Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans (3 page)

When Simon got up from his table with his dishes, a cracking noise shook the house. Distant thunder, then a boom and crash like big steel spoons pounding metal sheets. “All right, now, just hold your horses,” he said, looking out the kitchen window at falling dark and rain, wonder sketched on his lean face.

The main event was on. In minutes, the wind bellowed, rising now and then into a thin, shrill song like a distressed cat’s. Simon’s father had built the house well, but it would still be a long night. Simon stacked his dishes in the sink, opened the pantry door, and fumbled through a pile of old clothes, boots, checker sets, and domino boxes until he found the box as big as a hamper. He pulled it out and dragged it to the middle of the floor.

The “hurricane box.” Ladeena had always been one to prepare for the worst. After her passing he’d still dragged it out year after year, out of loyalty, or reflex, and now he pulled the items out one by one: an oil lamp, a flashlight, a first-aid kit, a box of wooden matches and an unopened box of tapers, a hand-crank radio, and three bags of dried soups he’d picked up in an Army surplus store in Baton Rouge. He put the dried soups back in, but set the oil lamp and the radio (still bearing its price tag) on the floor next to the box. And from a deep corner, he pulled the Bible Jacob Fortier had given him on his sixteenth birthday, a week before he died.

Simon ran his fingers along the brittle edges of the dry leather. He pulled out a chair from the dining table, sat, and opened the Bible. He turned to the first page, the name page, and at the end of the list of Fortier births, he traced his hand over his father’s wiggly script:

Simon Fortier, born July 8, 1929.

And then, his fingers traced the words written in his own hand:

Julian Fortier, born Aug 13, 1969.

Seeing his father’s hand always brought mist to his eyes, but tonight, it was the sight of Julian’s name that moved him. A frail and sickly newborn delivered with a tiny hole in his heart, the boy had been given a less-than-even chance for survival. On Julian’s birth night, during the surgery, Simon found himself sitting in the cold fluorescent glare of the fathers’ waiting room, head bowed between both hands, bargaining with God. When the child was finally given a good bill of health, Simon found a pay phone and called his closest relations, his Auntie Maree and cousin Genevieve at Silver Creek.

“How is he?” Genevieve’s voice was cautious.

Simon had to push the words out through a clog of tears. “Scrawny, no color. Doc says he’ll be OK, though. Prob’ly good as new.”

“Lord Jesus,” Genevieve cried, and called to her mother.

“I’ma send you some of my herbs for him,” Auntie Maree had told him in her usual too-loud telephone voice, her false teeth clicking. “Pack’em tight over his chest at night, and he’ll be fine. I done already seen it.” When he and Ladeena had brought him home from the hospital, he was so tiny and fragile he seemed breakable, caramel skin turned radish red, bawling a high-pitched wail from lungs that seemed anything but weak. In the sparsely furnished bedroom of the double shotgun, Simon sat on the bed and held his son in the crook of his arm, his face locked into an uncontrollable smile. He pressed his thumb against the baby’s palm and felt the tiny fist close around it.

He looked at Ladeena, eyes glassy. “I’d throw myself in front of a train for this boy.”

She smiled softly, a mischievous flicker in her eyes. “I know, darlin’. I’d throw you in front of a train for him, too.”

He chuckled. That woman’s slicing humor had always caught him off guard. He closed the Bible, laid it down next to the box.

Precious, that’s what he was, and might still have been so even if Ladeena’s frail womb could have accommodated another birth. They had tried not to spoil him, but to each of them the boy had been a reason to get up each morning, to work, to smile, to live. Cayenne pepper in honey-lemon tea, someone said, would keep colds away. So Simon plied the boy with hot drinks throughout the damp New Orleans winters. Trumpet lessons, somebody else said, might strengthen his lungs, so Simon pawned his wedding ring and bought a silver-plated Conn. And from Julian’s first blast of cracking, pitchless air, there would be no turning back. He became a trumpet player first, everything else second.

When Ladeena died and it was just the two of them, Simon and eighteen-year-old Julian found shelter from their grief in a brotherly bond, and stayed close even after Julian left for New York. But an accident, one slick, rainy night a year ago on Julian’s thirtysixth birthday, had done more than throw his brilliant career into a quandary—it had pushed father and son apart. Julian grew cool and testy, found acrimony in everything, humor in nothing. Simon reminded him to be patient; hadn’t the doctor said the surgery went well? With time, he’d be playing the trumpet better than ever. But Julian scoffed—a condescending silence that insinuated Simon didn’t know what he was talking about, and bruised his father’s tender ego. Afterwards, Julian’s fragile jaw tightened at the mere mention of his career, the trumpet, or the night when his future had changed.

If it had been only that, maybe things between them would have improved. But the argument over Simon’s employer and best friend had further shaken their bond. The horrible business deal with his best friend and boss, Parmenter, had been a mistake, maybe; Simon had never been that good with money. But it was old news. Yet when Julian found out about it recently, he acted as if it had happened yesterday. Money, Simon argued, was not worth breaking up a friendship, but he wondered if the matter would stand between him and his son forever.

And then, there was the matter of Silver Creek.

He grabbed his rib as a small pain shot up his back. He’d forgotten to take that arthritis medicine. Seemed it always happened when he thought about Julian and Silver Creek, and the storm didn’t help. Since the end of slavery, the land in Pointe Louree Parish, with its wild, arboreal splendor, fertile earth and teeming creek, had been his family’s blessing—everything that could grow there did so in abundance and untamed beauty. Ever since Simon’s great-grandfather, the Frenchman, had bequeathed it to his black son Moses, it had been passed down from son to son with care, like a genetic trait passing through blood.

It was Simon’s biggest failing, he believed, that while his son had inherited his thick hair, long-lashed eyes, and taste for music and well-seasoned food, he hadn’t gotten the love for family land. It was nowhere to be found in Julian’s trove of things that mattered, and it broke Simon’s heart.

Money, that’s what his son cared about. Cash. Coin. Like every other young man Simon knew. Nowadays it was hard to fill a young man’s head with his own history when his heart gave it no play.

Somewhere in the commotion of water thrashing the house and the locomotive howl of wind, the phone rang. Simon’s heart raced—the phone still worked?
About time that boy called to apologize.
He shifted his mood to one of forgiveness; Julian was calling, that was all that mattered.

“Hello?”

“Simon, you still there?”

His cousin Genevieve’s voice broke up in the weak connection from Silver Creek. He tried not to let his disappointment show.

“Genevieve.”

“Simon, Lord, I got to talk to you—”

Though he could barely hear her, it wasn’t hard to make out the panic in her voice.

“I know, I know,” he said. “I’m still here. But I’ma be all right. I’ll be calling you when this storm blows over.”

But she wasn’t talking about the storm. With the rain pummeling his house and the line growing more staticky, he could hear every other word. Something about the Parettes in Pointe Louree, he thought he heard, the family whose property bordered their land to the east.

Genevieve had told him weeks ago about the rumors: the developers sniffing around in their massive SUVs, shaded gazes lingering over the best properties in Pointe Louree, stroking their chins at green fields and imagining condos and parking lots. The Parette property had been in their family as long as Silver Creek had been in Fortier hands—longer. The Parettes would no sooner sell their land than the Fortiers, and the Fortiers would never sell.

“They found his car, he must of got run off the road…”

Genevieve’s speech wasn’t the best since she’d lost most of her bottom teeth. But he thought he heard something about an accident. An accident with their neighbor, Nicholas Parette.

“Veevy?” Simon shouted into the phone. “What did you say?”

More static. “Dead. He’s dead.”

Simon felt heat in his chest. “What?”

But the phone line had been silenced by the storm.

Simon went to the window and peered out, the sky black now, the wind spanking the trees in rhythmic frenzy, the pounding rain all but horizontal. The wind bellowed and cawed like something with bared teeth and scratching claws.

His pulse quickened. Parette? Simon couldn’t believe what Genevieve said was true. He’d known the Parettes since he was a boy at Silver Creek, skipping stones with the oldest boy, J.D., catching crawfish, learning to craft a perfect roux or season gumbo at Auntie Maree’s knee. Parette must have been ninety-five if he was a day. Lived alone after his wife died. Always drove that Chevy truck to town even with his bad eyesight, sometimes veering slightly off Dutch River Road toward the ditch. Everybody for miles around knew him, and everybody knew to look after him.

An accident, surely, but the combination of Genevieve’s tone and a roiling in Simon’s gut nagged with other possibilities. Before the storm had knocked out the phone line, something seemed off-kilter. He would call her tomorrow, or whenever the phone was working again.

A coincidence, surely. Nothing to be read into what Genevieve had mentioned to him those few weeks ago.

Simon went to the kitchen to pour himself a drink; the bourbon left over from last year’s July Fourth block party might calm his racing mind. He found it on the top shelf of the refrigerator and half-filled a Pilsner glass, then sat in his recliner and leaned back to listen to the banshee screams of the worst winds he’d ever heard.

His heart pounded with the steady drumbeat of thunder and wind and sudden fear. Something unnerved him, and he wished for all the world that he had talked to Julian tonight. There was always a comfort, a reassurance in hearing his son’s voice, no matter how far away he was, no matter what they were going through.

He turned up the whole glass, then leaned way back in the recliner and frowned as the slow burn of the liquor took hold in his gut. He closed his eyes and let the drink numb his muddled thoughts. Before long he was in that half-world between sleep and wakefulness, remembering the chafe of wind through the old trees that sang with the memory of a thousand storms before.

He slept the entire night in the chair. The next morning he rubbed sleep from his eyes. “I’m still here,” he said to himself, a sardonic smile crossing his face.

He puttered about the kitchen before looking out at the yard, the street. Cooler, darker now, with rain still slashing. The sky gray with the trees bending in the wind. But the drama seemed to have ended.
Thank the Lord
, he breathed a relieved sigh. The worst of the storm had passed the city by.

For the whole day, grayness and spitting rain consumed the sky. That night he slept soundly. And when he woke the next morning, it was to the sound of water crashing through his door, and quickly gathering around his bed.

Tokyo, August 2005

H
e should have been having the time of his life. He’d missed the scene for so long—the cavern-dark room pierced by the spotlights’ amber glow, the rhythm section kicking a tight groove, the people digging his music and ready to unleash their adulation. It could have been any stage, almost anywhere, and this was the scene that got his juices going. So the moment he’d stepped onto the Blue Note Tokyo’s stage twenty-five minutes ago, it had felt like coming home.

But now, the pain burrowed so deep it made him dizzy. The sound was still coming out of his trumpet, but it was as if he was standing outside himself, watching his own fingers move, almost admiring their ability to go on while everything else in him wanted to seize up or shut down. With the lightning-quick tempo the drummer had set, he struggled to keep up as the wall of sound—piano, bass, drums, tenor—roared like a train on a downhill track, full speed ahead, with him or without him.

Another pain buzzed through his jaw, and his embouchure froze. He stopped playing and shook his head while the piano covered him, took up the slack. The room grew hot, airless, as sweat beaded above his lip and his neck tightened. While the pain burned on, the spotlights glared like headlights. Suddenly he felt like some four-legged creature who’d staggered out onto a highway in front of a truck, blinded by the lights and frozen with fear.

He couldn’t do it. Could not go on. So even though they hadn’t even reached the bridge of the tune, he leaned over to his pianist.

He whispered hoarsely in his ear. “
Slow
. Anything slow. Then we quit.”