Things like the Truth

by Ellen Gilchrist

  These funny, generous, poorly dressed children played with Sean for more than an hour. As the play was winding down I walked nearer to them and thanked them for their kindness. “We have a little cousin like him,” the girl said. “We’re used to them.”

  “He comes over and undresses her Barbie dolls,” the boy added. “He does it every time he comes.”

  “I have twelve Barbies,” the girl added. “I might get another one for Christmas.”

  The boy laughed and climbed up on a precarious stair landing, balancing there. He was wearing a too-big tee-shirt that said BAGRAM AIR FORCE BASE, AFGHANISTAN.

  “Where did you get the tee-shirt?” I asked him. “Do you know someone in the army or air force or marines?”

  “Our daddy,” he said. “He was there.” He hung his head. “He went out on the porch and had a heart attack. He’s dead.”

  “When he came home?” I asked. “He had a heart attack here, at home, or when he was there?”

  “We don’t know,” they both said.

  “I’ll go ask my grandmother,” the boy said. “She’s right over there.” He pointed to a large, disheveled woman my age who was standing on the steps to the pavilion leaning on a cane.

  The boy and girl started running in her direction. “Oh, no,” I yelled. “Please don’t ask her. It’s three days until Christmas. Don’t remind her of that.”

  But it was too late. They were already beside her. I followed them as fast as I could. “Your grandchildren are wonderful,” I told her. “They have been so nice to my little grandson. What kind, good children they are. I’m so glad they were here today.”

  She smiled the same wonderful smile the chubby girl had been smiling and I wanted to run out to a store and buy five or six collector item Barbie dolls and lay them at the girl’s feet.

  Sean Daniel and I walked the family down to the grandmother’s old Cadillac Coup de Ville. “This is funny,” I said. “Your automobile is named the same thing as this park. De Ville is the name of the Frenchman in the new statue.”

  “The one with the cane and the sword?” the boy asked. But the light had gone out of his face. He helped his grandmother into the driver’s seat. She painfully pulled her game leg into the car and settled herself on a large chiropractor’s pillow.

  The girl got in the seat beside her grandmother and Sean Daniel and I stood waving until they had driven away.

  “Let’s go get your bicycle,” I said. “Your mom and dad are coming to get you to go get some shrimp for supper. Come on. Let’s see if any other children have shown up to play.”

  We held hands and walked back across the street and up the stairs and across the flags of six nations laid out in ceramic tiles along the sidewalk leading to the playground equipment. We walked past the beautiful new bronze water fountain made possible by a grant from the Post-Katrina Committee for Reconstruction. We walked across the handsome building which replaced the wooden reconstruction of the first French settlement in the Louisiana Territories. A moment ago Sean Daniel had been wildly chasing and spitting water on the tall handsome children of a fallen hero. Now he was alone with me, not even wondering how fun goes away so fast, comes so unexpectedly and bravely and runs so fast and hilariously to some ordained conclusion and people don’t stay. Come back to the park, you yell at them and sometimes they do come back and sometimes they don’t.

  “Look, Sean,” I said as we approached the playground. “Look at the twin girls in the pink sweaters. I bet they’re your age. Let’s go see if they want to play with you.”

  A shy girl in a pink playsuit had gingerly climbed up on the pirate ship and was standing by the dinosaur blocks.

  “The other girl’s up there too,” Sean said, getting excited, moving faster, leaving the tragedy behind and heading toward the huge plastic pirate ship full of little girls wearing pink.

  Five minutes later he was their slave. The twin girls had put him in the hold and told him to stay there. Ten minutes after that they had made the bottom of the ship into a house and he had been told to take off his jacket and use it for a blanket. They were putting him to bed. His wildness had disappeared and he was happily following any orders they gave him.

  Too much metaphor, I decided. He’s three-and-a-half years old, for God’s sake. They can’t be more than five. They have domesticated him as I watched.

  The twins had come equipped with Cheetos crackers and were feeding him in his bed. I went over and sat by their mother and we talked about local politics and how horrible the property taxes had become and how beautiful little girls look in pink and how much little boys liked them and sometimes even agreed to be their slaves.

  They were feeding him in the bed they had made underneath the pirate ship. He was lying flat on his back with his jacket over his arms for a blanket and they were feeding him. The oldest game in the world, being played, as we speak, all over the world, on sandy beaches and in jungles and in cardboard boxes in backyards and in garages and bedrooms and dorm rooms and closets. I was an ace at playing house. Ask any of my cousins. I was a switch hitter when it came to playing house but preferred boys. If I had to play with a girl cousin I made her be the man unless it was doctor. I was always the doctor and she was the nurse.

  The sobering moment with the faded grey Bagram Air Force Base tee-shirt haunted me all day. I kept counting up my progeny and naming them and forgiving their trespasses against my conservative, proto-Victorian standards. They weren’t taught those standards by the culture in which they are living or by their teachers or some of them by the women my sons marry so how can I expect anything else? I can’t. I shouldn’t. But, of course, I do.

  Why should I care so much what they do? They are breathing. Oh, God, let them keep breathing.

  We lost a five-month-old fetus a few days before Christmas. My third great-grandchild. I had a premonition about the pregnancy. Very strong, very scary. So did my granddaughter-in-law, the mother. She knew something was wrong. When they took the fetus they found it was very undeveloped. The doctor wasn’t even able to tell the sex. I had thought it was a girl. The mother had an IUD for three years and had just removed it. Was that a cause? She wonders and so do I. Everything about birth and birth control and pregnancy is still so much more complicated and dangerous than we admit in the twenty-first century. My oldest son was coming a month early and was a footling, coming one foot first. Only modern medicine saved the two of us, and the nine children who were born to his wives. How wonderful that we manage to think we are in charge. At least we know there are things we know that we cannot articulate or prove.

  We went to hear the children’s choir at Holy Name Cathedral in New Orleans at four in the afternoon on Christmas Eve. Garrett Gilchrist Walker fell asleep in my lap and I covered him with my running vest and Jean Tyson’s beautiful hand-me-down Burberry raincoat. I was charmed by the service and the hymns. Marshall Kingman Walker II, age six, also fell asleep, so for most of the service Marshall Kingman Walker I and I sat with children sleeping in our laps. Very lovely. It was cold and raining outside the cathedral. A cold front from Canada was pushing down on New Orleans but the southern winds from the Gulf of Mexico turned it into rain and pushed the cold back to the north and east. It is warm here now, and pleasant and sunny. I don’t want to leave and spend the winter in Fayetteville but I will, because my Scots work ethic is as strong as southern winds or northern cold fronts and I need the money.

  Hurricane, 2005, August 26: Testimony of Grandmother Ellen

  THE HURRICANE HIT NEW ORLEANS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE night. The next day the levees broke and the Gulf of Mexico began to pour into the town. By then my children and grandchildren from New Orleans and the Mississippi coast were all safe in Jackson, Mississippi, and I was on my way there, driving as fast as I dared and stopping every fifty miles to fill up with gasoline as I had heard there was no gasoline in Jackson.

  The electric lines were down and the gasoline pumps wouldn’t work and the roads were clogged with trees and debris so
the refilling trucks couldn’t get to the cities.

  My children’s cellular phones didn’t work. The cell towers had been knocked down by the storm as it made its way up the state of Mississippi. It also knocked down fences and hedge rows and tore up roads and uprooted pine forests and generally turned the state into an emergency zone. Still I kept on driving. I wanted to count heads and fingers and toes. I wanted to give away the hundred-dollar bills I had taken out of the bank in Fayetteville as I had also heard the banks weren’t working. No electricity, no computers, no drive-in cash machines.

  I wanted to wade in and see if I could help. I was a seventy-year-old woman on a mission.

  I was not, however, willing to stay in my brother’s house with ten other people and three Labrador retrievers, one of which was fourteen years old and belonged to my cousin Bunky. I was going to stay in town with some friends who still had air conditioning.

  At least the rains had stopped. The air was crystal clear, the skies cerulean blue, gentle cirrus clouds like sleeping angels. The town of Jackson was very quiet. The only cars that seemed to be moving were emergency vehicles, repair trucks, and an occasional police car. There were long lines at the few filling stations that still had gasoline. I was down to half a tank as the last town that had gas was near the Arkansas line east of the Greenville, Mississippi, bridge.

  Jackson, Mississippi, is two hundred miles north of where the hurricane hit but it was almost closed down from tornado damage in the area.

  It was late in the afternoon when I got to Jackson. I went to my friends’ house and managed to get a call in to my daughter-in-law and my two oldest granddaughters. They had lost their home and all their stuff and most of their cars. They came over to my friends’ house and we hugged and talked and then I took all three of them out to the mall to get clean underwear and new makeup. I know that sounds stupid but I was trying to keep them busy while we waited to hear about the fate of the small town on the Mississippi coast where they live and I have a summer house. My son was in St. Croix pulling up satellite images and calling to tell us what he could see. It was my son who told his children and ex-wife that their home was gone.

  “We’ll fix it,” I said. “We’ll get you an apartment here while we figure out what to do next. We’ll get an apartment and fill it with inexpensive furniture and go from there.”

  My oldest grandson, their son and brother, was in Jackson with his wife and child, working at a hospital, waiting to go to medical school. At least they would all be together.

  The next problem was to find my youngest son and his two daughters, who had refugeed from New Orleans to my niece’s farm in Madison County, outside of Jackson.

  They had spent a night with the crowd at my brother’s house, then gone out to the farm where there were horses and other children.

  As soon as I was dressed the next morning I picked up my daughter-in-law and granddaughters at my grandson’s house and we went out to the farm to see the little girls, Abigail and Juliet, ages ten and eight.

  Their mother and grandmother had ridden out the storm in a huge old stucco house in New Orleans. My son had the children for the weekend so he brought them to Jackson. His British ex-mother-in-law had refused to leave, so her daughter, the girls’ mother, had stayed with her.

  They ended up in a crowded hotel in the French Quarter when the police made them leave the house. From there they went to Baton Rouge for four weeks. We were glad. We didn’t care what a lot of crazy British women did to prove they were British, we had the girls with us.

  “No school for a week or two,” I told them. “Can you stand that?”

  “No kidding,” the oldest one said. “I guess I’ll just ride horses and play with my cousins.”

  They seemed to be in a good mood. My son had no idea what had happened to his small house in New Orleans. He had boarded it up and left with his children. It would be days before anyone was allowed to drive the highways to New Orleans and the coast so we were living on hearsay and television reports. Except for the satellite photos being relayed from my son in St. Croix.

  The big stucco house where the little girls lived with their British mother was on high ground and had survived with little damage. A tree had fallen into the swimming pool. We heard that report from somewhere.

  On the afternoon of that second day we went out and rented an apartment for my daughter-in-law and the older girls. Both of their colleges were going to be closed indefinitely. The oldest one had been at the University of New Orleans, which she disliked, and the younger one had been in a small college on the coast for two days when the storm came and blew it away.

  After we rented the apartment we all, including my son and the younger girls, went out to a huge discount furniture store and bought furniture and arranged to have it delivered. Then we went to Walmart and bought pots and pans and coffee makers and sheets and towels and pillows and everything we could think of to make a home. I was not going to have my oldest granddaughters be homeless.

  In the end no one ever lived in the apartment. My son with the two small daughters found a house that was being restored and offered to do some of the work if the contractor would rent it to him quickly. We moved the furniture and stuff from Walmart to that house.

  The days were going by quickly from the time I arrived. So many people were having so many ideas and acting on them so quickly, I can’t remember what happened when. Pierre and Abigail and Juliet moved into the house he had rented.

  My daughter-in-law, Rita, took her three children and drove to Ocean Springs to inspect the ruins. She found a few pieces of Spode china and the cars upside down in a small lake formed by the tidal wave.

  They were driving a Chevrolet my oldest granddaughter had rented while her car was being repaired. They ended up keeping the car for two months and the insurance company kept on paying for it. The car being repaired was a Mitsubishi Gallant I had given Ellen six months before. They had driven the rented Chevrolet to Jackson because it had the largest trunk. I had bought the Mitsubishi with money I made holding a chair in the humanities at Tulane University. I used the money to buy cars for Ellen, Aurora, Marshall, and Pierre, a humane use for money if I ever heard of one.

  Since then I have been using my money to pay tuition to various colleges and medical schools and universities. I get money from a university and I give it to other universities. I am an extremely inventive economist and sometimes think I should offer my service to the United States government.

  Here is the cast of characters for this Hurricane report.

  Grandmother Ellen, me

  Ellen Walker, my oldest granddaughter

  Aurora Walker, numero dos granddaughter

  Rita Walker, my brilliant daughter-in-law

  Pierre Walker, my youngest son

  Abigail Walker, his oldest daughter, my fourth granddaughter

  Juliet Walker, numero dos daughter, my fifth granddaughter

  Robert Alford Gilchrist, my younger brother, “Uncle Bob”

  Robert Alford Gilchrist, “Little Bob,” age eleven

  Whitney Marion Gilchrist, my niece, age fifteen

  Julie Brasfield Gilchrist, my wonderful, long-suffering sister-in-law

  Treena Gilchrist Klaus, my niece, who lives on a horse farm with her generous and kind husband, Jimmy, and her children

  Amy Klaus, twelve at time of the hurricane

  Tyler Klaus, thirteen at time of the hurricane

  Aunt Roberta Alford Kleinschmidt, my mother’s youngest sister, who shares my sons’ rare blood type and is the most outspoken of all my aunts. I loved her very much. Her home in New Orleans was destroyed so she moved, at age eighty-three, to her house on the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama, and invited members of her Episcopal Church in Metairie to come and live with her if they had lost their homes. Many of them did. I sent her newspaper reports and got many very funny letters from her in return. If I can find any of them I will add them to this essay as an addendum. One she especially liked was a long, un
necessarily nasty article in the New York Times Sunday Living section about people from New Orleans moving to their second homes on the coast. I sent it to Roberta by Federal Express since mail and newspapers were not being delivered for several months after the storm.

  George W. Healy, Junior, my beloved oldest first cousin, called by everyone he knows, “Bunky.” He was the president of the United States Maritime Lawyers Association. I met him once in New York City where they were having a meeting and was delighted to find that everyone there called him “Bunky.”

  Sharon Healy, Bunky’s wife, who allows him to be exactly who he is without ever trying to change him. She is from Oklahoma and my mother and Bunky’s mother adored her and were so happy when Bunky settled down and made her his wife. Sharon and Bunky are the about-to-be-married couple in my short story “The Famous Poll at Jody’s Bar.”

  Assorted Labrador retrievers, Prestidigitation, Dooley, and Maggie II.

  My hosts for the weekend, Tom and Rita Royals and their daughter, Kate. While not otherwise occupied during those days I campaigned to get Kate to go to Millsaps College to study English. I won, she went, and had a stellar career there. She became the editor of the Millsaps newspaper and hired my niece, Whitney, when Whitney went to Millsaps two years later. My campaign was based on my love for and belief in Millsaps as a haven for lovers of literature and, also, my newfound idea that we should not send young girls off to school in strange cities where they have no fathers or brothers or cousins to protect them.