City of Refuge Page 4

  “Feel free, sister,” SJ said, rinsing the raw strips of chicken under the tap. “Anytime you want to bring some flowers is allright.” He flicked a small wad of the cornmeal into the oil to see if it was hot enough yet.

  “You know what I’m saying, Samuel,” she said, watching the weatherman with his bad toupee gesturing at a swirl of clouds on the radar screen. “They need Nash Roberts back on,” she said. “Where he went?”

  “I imagine he retired.” SJ stopped what he was doing at the sink and walked over, drying his hands on a dish towel, to watch the weatherman with Lucy. Footage from Florida—trees down, a million people without power. “They saying it’s headed to the Gulf?”

  Lucy grunted, and SJ watched the images carefully. When the commercial came on he went back to making dinner and said, “Have you talked with Wesley?”

  “I haven’t seen him for two days. When y’all had that fight?”

  “That was Monday.”

  “Well however many days that was.”

  That previous Monday night Wesley had shown up for dinner after disappearing for two days—he knew he had left his uncle’s tools sitting out and that SJ would be angry. SJ and Lucy were in the kitchen just as they were now; the sound of footsteps had come from the front of the house, and then Wesley walked into the room, wearing blue cut-off sweatpants, high-top sneakers, an oversized white T-shirt hanging down to his thighs and a baseball cap, backward.

  Lucy set her beer down on the counter without letting go of it and put out her free arm for him. “Baby boy,” she said, with a slight mock grandeur that meant she was on her way to getting drunk.

  “Where Luther at?” Wesley said, walking to his mother and hugging her briefly. He looked around the kitchen, restless, looked at the TV for a moment, went to the bowl of grapes on the counter.

  “He in Boutte,” Lucy said. “You forgotten about that?”

  “Take your hat off,” SJ said.

  Wesley took off the cap, ran his hand through his chaotic hair quickly and said, “Sorry Unca J,” shot a mischievous smile at his mother, who gave him a little smile back, and pulled some grapes off their stems to eat. “You still mad at me about the tools Unca J?”

  SJ took a moment to breathe evenly before saying, “What do you think?”

  “I think Unca J mad at me about the tools.” Wesley ate another handful of grapes.

  “Then why do you need me to tell you something you already know?”

  “I meant to put them away, Unca J. I finished the cornice and I saw what time it was and I had to go. I was going to come back later.”

  “Sister,” SJ said, “can you get the dishes out the icebox.”

  Lucy retrieved two plastic bowls, one with chopped onions and one with chopped bell peppers, and set them on the counter where SJ had arranged several large cloves of garlic.

  “You like that bike you’ve been riding?” SJ said.

  “Unca J, I didn’t…”

  “Be quiet. If you loaned me that bike to go get you something at the store and I went and got it for you and then left the keys in the bike sitting out at the curb, how that make you feel?”

  Wesley looked down at the floor; Lucy watched the baseball game on the television.

  “How that make you feel?”

  Wesley looked up at his uncle, then looked away, frustrated and angry that he was being backed into a corner.

  “How many times I’m going to have to ask you this question?”

  “It was a hammer and an apron and some nails. How much that can cost?”

  “Two hammers and a wedge, but it’s not about that. It’s about are you paying attention to what you doing. And I didn’t hear nobody say ‘I’m sorry.’ I heard ‘I meant to do this’ and ‘I meant to do that.’”

  Wesley turned and walked out of the kitchen and had not been back since.

  Now, on Thursday evening, SJ and Lucy brought their plates into the dining room to a big cypress table their grandfather had made that could seat ten people if it had to, and they joined hands as they always did, and bowed their heads, and SJ said, “Father, we thank you for the food you place on our table, and for us being here together. We pray that you keep us and those we love safe from harm and hunger. And we want to pray for Wesley, too, that he will come back unharmed and that we will be a whole family again. Amen.”

  Lucy said “Amen” along with SJ as she reached for the sweet potatoes. “You kept that short, SJ,” Lucy said. “Daddy say thank you for so many things by the time he finished the food be cold.”

  They sat silently, eating. SJ loved his house, with its waist-high wainscoting in the dining room, rescued from the old Tranchina’s Restaurant he and his daddy had demolished. The wide plank floors in the living room were varnished seat planks from high school bleachers from the West Bank. SJ had done all the work himself, treated the wood, replaced all the joists under the living room floor. On the wall, a painting of two swans that Rosetta’s sister Vonetta had made; she had had a scholarship to an art school somewhere and had died of a brain tumor when she was nineteen. That was a long time ago.

  “Samuel,” she said, “why you think you never got married again?”

  “No particular reason,” he answered, pouring some root beer into his glass from the bottle on the table.

  “But it seem like you never even go out or nothing.”

  “What about Melva?”

  “That bitch was no good for you, Samuel. That not what I’m talking about. I seen her last week out on the corner, you know what I’m saying; she look like…”

  SJ put up his hand and said, “I don’t really want to hear about that, Loot. I don’t necessarily want to hear about it.” It had been a brief relationship, five years in the past, but despite the woman’s bad behavior SJ saw no reason to take pleasure in a catalog of her misfortunes. The relationship hadn’t made him especially anxious to try romance again. He had felt old impulses aroused that he didn’t need to be dealing with. One night he actually found himself walking to Junior’s with a .38 in his waistband looking for a man he knew Melva had spent some time with, and luckily right up by Tennessee Street saw himself almost as if from above, like a voice saying to him, Are you going back to that? Is that what you want? And he had turned around and walked back to his house and wept in frustration and loneliness. But after that things were over with Melva, and he didn’t bother about it anymore.

  “What about Leeshawn, Samuel?”

  SJ wished his sister would stop the line of questioning. “She more like a cousin. Or used to be. Anyway I can’t see her without I see a teenager, and she lives in Los Angeles.” Actually, he remembered, she had moved back to Houston after her marriage failed. Didn’t matter.

  “She ain’t no teenager no more for a long time, SJ. She allright and she like you.”

  “I don’t see you with nobody, Loot,” he said, deflecting the question. “Why you don’t make time for a man?”

  “I don’t need nobody, Samuel. It allright at a distance. I get involved, it like my shit fall apart instantly. Like you carrying a grocery bag and the bottom fell out. Cans rolling all up and down the street—cabbages and shit…”

  In the distance they heard a familiar sound, a blunt tut-tut-tut. They got quiet for a moment to see if there was anything else coming. Although all manner of gunfire was common, you always stopped to listen where it might be coming from. SJ said, “That sound like it by Holy Cross.”

  Another moment and Lucy said, “Look here, you heard about Joseph back in jail again?”

  “Joseph from the East?”

  “No, Samuel, Joseph you used to call Squatty.”

  “I am surprised to hear he’s still alive.”

  “You want to hear about a dumb motherfucker? He taken some lady’s purse uptown, and then he taken the bank card and use it and forgot he needed the secret number, right? So the machine keep the card and he starts tripping and calls the service number on the machine complaining about he can’t get the card out. On h
is own goddamn cell phone, Samuel.”

  “That’s how they found him?”

  “No; police saw the nigger at the bank machine in the wrong neighborhood and decided to see what was he doing and he just run, left Shontay sitting right there in the car with the motor running.”

  “They arrested her, too?”

  “No, they let her go.”

  This made SJ think of Wesley again, and he remembered the Saints tickets. One of SJ’s customers had given him two tickets to the next night’s New Orleans Saints game at the Superdome. The Saints, the great Lost Cause of their city. SJ wasn’t that much of a football fan and he had been assuming he would give the tickets either to Bootsy or to Roland from his crew. It occurred to him now that they might be an incentive for Wesley to show his face again, and he mentioned this to Lucy. He knew that Lucy often knew how to get in touch with her son even if she didn’t let on to SJ.

  “I’ll let him know if I talk with him, Samuel.” SJ knew also that his nephew played football on Sunday mornings at Joe Brown Park, and he asked Lucy if Wesley would be there on Sunday. “One thing Wesley don’t never miss is football,” she replied.

  How much anger was a man supposed to carry around?

  On his knees, by his bed, one hand over his eyes. The nightly wrestle, the quarrel, the accounting demanded.

  Lucy’s questioning had unsettled him. His own daughter, Camille, would tell him he needed to find someone to keep him company, cook for him, soften and brighten his days. But he was used to doing for himself—cooking, laundry, cleaning…It was an echo of the discipline of the army, the one good thing about the army. Introducing someone else into the equation at this point was more than he could manage. And when he had dated a woman he couldn’t escape feeling that he was being unfaithful to Rosetta. He kept her pictures around, her vases and little things, fetish objects. He could not accept her death. Everyone said you had to accept God’s will, but in SJ’s heart he accepted nothing. Accepting things as a fact of life was different from accepting them in your heart.

  The injustice of her being taken from the world weighed in his heart like an anchor. He had taken care of her as she wasted away. She never cared for expensive clothes or fine jewelry; she was without envy of others. The other women in the neighborhood turned to her instinctively for advice, even women ten years older than she was. She had a fine, long neck that he liked to kiss, and when she got sick he used to brush her hair. No amount of “It’s God’s will,” and “She’s gone to a better place, SJ” from her friends and from Father Moreau could make it all right. Nothing could redeem it for him. The only thing that helped, at all, was working with his hands—building, making. He managed himself and his business, but something had gone out of life for him, perhaps permanently. Functioning in the face of any injustice disfigures you. If it kills you or drives you crazy, you are disfigured, and if you can contain it and channel it and work around it, you are still disfigured.

  He tried to concentrate, on his knees, listening for a voice out there, somewhere, as if he were standing on a beach at night. Where was justice? His own father, a man who had raised children, built houses from the ground up, flew supply planes during World War II, facing that condescension from the baby-fat white boys half his age in their chino slacks and Oxford shirts from Perlis. They would call him “Uncle,” with their unwarranted familiarity. “How ’bout that overhang, there, Uncle? You’re going to fix that right?” Then afterward, “Good, Uncle,” clapping him on the shoulder and SJ could read his father’s expression behind the mask. His father never gave them the “yassuh” treatment; he kept his dignity, smoked his Nat Sherman shorties, dressed well and never let himself forget who brought the meat to the table. But it was because he knew his own worth that the injustice of it burned so.

  Work had been his father’s way of insisting on being in the world. SJ had inherited that, along with a faculty for it, a love for the tangible and the tactile, the fact of something being there afterward. The pride in getting something right, knowing your tools, having a firm grasp of principles. This was what had rescued him from the chaos of his own nature, and it was what he had to pass along to Wesley, but it came through with an urgency that made Wesley want to run away, stake out his own territory, escape the life of steely deflection of injustice, duty, responsibility, find a place of flexibility and possibility.

  SJ saw that and it only made him press his points home harder and more insistently, and he knew it drove his nephew farther away—even though Wesley had that same faculty, could fix things, seemed to know instinctively how machinery worked, could take apart clocks and radios, motors, put them back together. Aside from Camille, Wesley was what he had right now of a future, and he saw Wesley straining against that same realization that he himself had strained against as a young man. Wesley didn’t want to end up like SJ, living alone, running a tight ship, priding himself on his discipline, the ability to maintain a nonnegotiable pride in oneself and one’s ability, and to contain the anger that, no matter how well contained, was still without redress, the chronic undervaluing of men like his father and women like his mother, which ate away at him, at his veins and his muscle, his blood pressure, dragged at his heart and constricted his veins. Wesley wanted freedom but he didn’t know where to find it.

  SJ had found it, for a minute, in the army. The army had given him mixed gifts. A pride in his physical abilities, in his will and his stamina, exposure to people from other parts of the country and the world. It had also left him with a permanent shame for some things that he had seen and one thing he had participated in and which he had never, ever, discussed with anyone, not even Rosetta, and never would. But it left a residue, a stain that dried and stiffened into a distrust of human possibility, and a deep mistrust of a God who could look down on such a scene and do nothing. Ultimately, it turned into a shame at existing in the first place, chronic, like arthritis. The steely armature of the code of brothers, the conviction that they were absolved by their circumstances for their misdeeds…Even with those who bought into the code completely, the conviction went only so deep and concealed a molten center that could explode without warning. All those men who snapped at some unpredictable stroke of the clock and took their mad moment on a roof someplace and left a few people dead, or howling on the sidewalk, clutching their leg, then turned the carbine on themselves…How many of them had shared those same brotherly experiences in Vietnam? The anger stayed with him now, thirty years later, watching the tough talkers who had never seen war themselves, mama’s boys dressing up in uniforms they had done nothing, themselves, to honor, sending soldiers off to yet another place they didn’t understand, on a mission with no intelligible goals…

  Breathe, SJ.

  Rosetta had saved him; he could very easily have ended up like a lot of others. She had given him years of family and stability, raising Camille, going to the school plays, cooking dinner for friends in the neighborhood and family, Christmas, holidays. Decorating the house, dyeing Easter eggs, putting up pictures, and photographs, fabric flowers, little vases that she loved. He still had Lucy, and Wesley, and Bootsy across the street, North Derbigny, his street, their street, and the life of his neighborhood, where almost all of them had lived for decades. Neighbors for whom he had done light carpentry work for free, older ladies and men to whom he gave money now and again, the corners where you could remember your father walking, or playing as a boy with a friend who might still even live there, a senior citizen, now, like yourself…That continuity stepped in to fill the cracks at times when it seemed like nothing made any sense. You had a place, a role to fill, a sense of being part of something bigger than yourself, a community.

  SJ didn’t participate the way he used to. When he was young he used to like to get out there behind the parades and do that second-line, dance with his podnuhs, slide his cap to the side, what they called acey-deuce, jump in with Leon or Joe, get the counterrhythms going, the little sleight of hand with the feet, the head doing one thing an
d the shoulders another and the hips—integrated, and part of the larger flow, stopping to hug your aunt-tee up on her steps; it didn’t matter if it was an anniversary or a funeral. People from other places mistook it for carefree happiness, but it was not that at all. It was joy at connecting the world of the spirit with the physical world, the Word made flesh (and bone and muscle and sound), a sacrament without a sacrifice. Not that they necessarily would have thought of it in those terms, unless they were like Mr. Perrilliat with all his books, a little old berry-black man who talked like a professor and was rumored to have gone to Howard University decades earlier and worked maintenance at the Criminal Court, where the lawyers called him Mose and tipped him five bucks at Christmas…

  SJ didn’t jump into the parades anymore. He would hook up the big oil drum he had converted into a grill and barbecue on the neutral ground during a parade, and he would be the center of all the family and friends, and neighbors in beach chairs joking, eating, being themselves while he cooked up the pork chops and the hot sausage, and hot dogs for the kids, and that was enough for him. What was it that kept him out of the parades and the dancing in the street? What was he holding tight on to in his heart? Once in a great while, if the mood was just right and he was feeling good, he might do one of his old-time moves from back in the day, ankles bucking in, hips shaking in syncopated time as he expressionlessly turned some meat with a long fork, and maybe Lucy or Shawnetta or Bootsy would holler something at him and he would crack up laughing. And all around him all that defiant laughter and defiant grace that kept them all alive.

  Before he got up off his knees, he asked again to be shown the way, if there was a way, and he prayed for Lucy. SJ knew she wasn’t taking her blood pressure pills and diabetes pills; he knew because once when he had carried her back to her house from a drunk he had checked in the medicine cabinet and the three month-old prescription bottles were in there, full and untouched. His guess was that God, if He existed, must have felt about humanity somewhat the way SJ felt about Lucy. Maybe God had problems of His own. Maybe the creation, as grand as it was, had something flawed in it, something He hadn’t gotten quite right. All that work, all that love and beauty, and still the warpage in the mechanism. People prayed for His compassion and understanding, but maybe mankind had to have compassion for God, too.