“Well, it sounds like I’m hearing the voice of a long-lost nephew,” Etienne’s uncle Kiryl says the evening Etienne calls Halifax. “Boy, whatcha know good?”
“Got married and had a baby,” Etienne says. “But you know that. I’m calling to catch up with the family up there. I heard Yancy got married.”
“With a wife that is a bit too old for the boy to handle,” Kiryl says. “But he seems to be making it work.”
Some of the news Kiryl relates was in the card Etienne read when he was in the hospital. But when the talk turns to Luela, he begins to focus his mind. He listens, recalling the stiff hug his aunt gave him before she climbed onto the bus at the depot in Burlington.
“I’ve left several messages for her at the hotel,” he says. “But no call.”
“Why don’t you try calling Africaville?” Kiryl says. “Two of the businesses on the bluff have telephones now. The one in the rooming house is your best bet. Somebody there will definitely get a message to Luela.”
“I did call there,” Etienne says.
The phone line is quiet for a moment. “Luela tells me you are down there crowing,” Kiryl says.
“Doing what?”
“Crowing.”
“What is that?”
“That means a colored person is passing for white.”
Etienne grips the phone. “I am only living my life. That’s all.”
“I’m not going to tell you how to live,” Kiryl says. “As my father, Chevy, used to say, them’s your business.”
Etienne continues the conversation, embarrassed about how curtly he answered his uncle. A glance around his living room reveals no pictures of his mother displayed. In fact, there are no pictures of any of his Halifax relatives. White is what everybody down here in Alabama thinks he is. Is that his doing?
“I’ve begun reading a few of the Mississippi newspapers in the college library,” Etienne says. “I hear that the governor over there is trying to fix the overcrowding in the prisons.”
“Does that mean your grandmother may remain in Mississippi?”
“Possibly.”
“That’s good to hear.”
“I also plan on trying to locate some of the family over there.”
“Do you still have those letters I gave you a few years back?”
“Somewhere.”
“Well, take another look at them again,” Kiryl says. “The Platts down there have been blaming Zera for years for getting Matthew Platt thrown in prison, where he died. Read the letters. That way you’ll know what you are getting yourself into.”
Etienne hangs up the phone, wondering what to make of his uncle’s words. He will try to locate the letters. He also intends to check out the relatives on his own. So what if the family once disliked Zera? People change. He hopes to change himself.
A search of several closets in the house turns up no sign of the letters Kiryl had given Etienne long ago during Marcelina Higgins’s picture party on Woods Bluff. The letters must be in the boxes he left in the basement of Jocelyn’s aunt’s house in Vermont, he decides.
When the letters arrive from Jocelyn’s aunt several weeks later, Etienne rereads them, surprised by the nasty words the relatives have written about Zera. In one letter addressed to Chevy Platt, they are clear: Don’t bother to send her son, Omar, down here to visit.
“I suppose what I thought about the family in Mississippi is still correct,” Etienne tells Jocelyn one evening. “These may not be people I want to contact.”
A few weeks later, though, out of curiosity, he dials a number given to him by his uncle Kiryl. “I’ve contacted one of my relatives in Mississippi,” he tells Jocelyn one Saturday afternoon while the two of them are doing chores in the backyard of their house.
Jocelyn rises from where she has been pulling weeds out of her small herb garden. She takes off her work gloves, giving a tentative smile. “Have you spoken to anybody there yet?”
“Talked to a woman who married into the Platt family. But she didn’t stay on the phone long. I asked to speak to her husband and she said she would pass on the message. But he hasn’t called me back.”
“Will you keep trying?”
“I guess.”
Weeks go by with no result, and Etienne calls the prison in Mississippi where his grandmother is incarcerated. “You need to fill out the visitor permission forms,” the clerk tells him. “You can come in and pick up the forms, or we can mail them to you.”
Etienne is about to give the clerk his address, when he realizes that his call is being transferred to another department. Listening to the hum and static on the line, he thinks over his decision. It is not yet clear that his grandmother will be moved out of state, though she might be. But if she remains a few hours’ drive away, what can he do for her? Her age makes him uneasy. She must be eighty by now. He hopes she lives for decades more, but she may not. As far as he can tell, no other relatives visit her. Would he be responsible for her funeral? And if he gets close to her, how will he feel about her death? Will it throw him as the recent deaths of his grandparents from Montreal did?
And what if his grandmother is a bad seed? The family she married into seems to think so. Where are her blood relatives? There must be some reason they do not visit. If his grandmother needs plenty of help, can he provide it? He has a family to look after. What’s the rush? Etienne thinks, hanging up the phone. He can call back tomorrow.
The next week he reads a Mississippi Clarion Ledger article saying that no prisoners will be moved out of the state. Afterward, he lets the matter lie for several months. But then, reluctantly, he puts in a visitation request to see Zera.
Several months later a copy of the visitation request is returned to him. Stamped diagonally across the page in large blocky letters are the words DENIED BY INMATE.
The visitation request, along with copies of various articles from Mississippi newspapers, goes into a drawer of his desk at work. He resumes today’s paperwork feeling relieved, but later in the day, he feels embarrassed to have no immediate desire to keep trying to see Zera. After all, she is family.
As the months pass, Mississippi recedes from his mind. Then the years begin to pass, and Mississippi remains merely a thought, coming up sometimes in the once-a-year telephone call Etienne makes to his uncle in Halifax. On the call Etienne reminds Kiryl that Zera is still a stubborn woman.
Can it be that soon you will have been on this earth for forty-five years?” Jocelyn says this evening. “How many months is that?”
It is Saturday, March 20, 1982. Jocelyn is driving the car on their return from the Barnraiser Steakhouse, where a group of work colleagues and friends had gathered to celebrate Etienne’s upcoming birthday. Etienne, drunk from too much tequila, wants to play along with Jocelyn’s game. But all he can think about is the fact that he will spend this coming Thursday, the day of his actual birthday, in the hospital recuperating from yet another operation on the hip he injured years ago in his motorcycle accident.
The day after the operation, Etienne wakes up several times eager to talk to hospital workers. He doesn’t mention the birthday balloons hanging about the room. Instead he talks about the upcoming wedding of his son, Warner. “My son’s engaged to a nice woman whose father is a banker,” he tells a cleaning woman. “And his future mother-in-law is a TV news reporter.”
Etienne drifts off to sleep with only one regret: that Timothee is not alive to attend. It took months to feel a release from the pain he felt because of his father’s death several years back.
The wedding date has been set for a year from this coming May, a few days after his son and future daughter-in-law will graduate college. On the afternoon that Etienne is discharged from the hospital, he arrives home to find that Jocelyn has already begun gathering addresses for the wedding invitations to be sent to the future groom’s family.
Later in the fall, in the living room, where Jocelyn is addressing invitations, she hands Etienne two light-blue envelopes.
&nb
sp; “I wasn’t sure about sending these,” Jocelyn says.
One is addressed to Etienne’s cousin Berto in Montreal; the other, to his uncle Kiryl in Halifax. Etienne scans a third envelope, which is addressed to his aunt Luela. Jocelyn’s words suggest she knows that he might not yet be ready to invite any of the relatives from Canada. She sounds like she wants him to think the matter over.
Etienne puts the envelopes in his briefcase, wanting to remind his wife that they have not yet told their son that he has black relatives. Etienne feels a bit sorry about that. But if there ever was a proper time to fix the oversight, it has arrived.
Several weeks later, searching his briefcase for a work memo, Etienne realizes that all three invitations are still with him. If Jocelyn finds out that he has not mailed the invitations, the reasons will not be as she might conclude. He hesitates to invite his relatives from Canada not because he does not want them to come. He does. And it is not because he is ashamed of his colored mother. Jocelyn has heard certain comments spoken during visits with their future in-laws. She knows their son is marrying into a family that would be uneasy to learn their daughter is about to marry a man of another race. He has never heard his son’s fiancée or her parents make explicitly bigoted remarks. But he has heard the unflattering things they say about the neighborhoods in Montgomery where the black people live.
When he first came to Alabama everybody used the term colored to refer to Negroes. People in Alabama seem slow to change to the term black. If he recalls correctly, the schoolboys at Saint Richelieu years ago used the term black. On matters of race, is the world moving forward or backward? Is his son, Warner, colored? Is he black? Does his son get to choose? He did. At least he thought he did.
Etienne decides not to mail the invitations. When Jocelyn finds out, he can tell she is disappointed with him. But with his son and future daughter-in-law over for dinner several months before the wedding, Etienne sees the prudence in his decision, especially having gotten the news of a coming grandchild.
A week after the wedding Etienne is rushed to the hospital with swelling in his side, a complication from his riding and his operations. “His body is not responding to the antibiotics in a way we had hoped,” the doctor tells Jocelyn. “We’re going to keep him at the hospital for observation.”
Jocelyn takes a seat beside the bed where Etienne sleeps, her anger reigniting over his motorcycle obsession. After she sold the expensive model he bought ten years ago, he purchased another one. Why?
On her way home from the hospital to change clothes, Jocelyn stops by the offices of the Montgomery Times and places a classified ad: “Late Model Motorcycle for Sale. Very Good Condition.” Two days later, she receives a handful of crisp twenty-dollar bills from a man who wants the motorcycle. Over Warner’s objections, she also hands over the helmet, riding gloves, and the collection of handkerchiefs Etienne tied around his arm when he went riding.
No need for those things anymore, she tells herself over the long week during which the doctors work to get Etienne’s infection under control.
The efforts by the doctors fail and on the evening of June 25, 1984, Etienne Omar George Peletier dies.
By early August, Jocelyn has packed up the house in Woodhaven. The evening before the movers arrive to load her belongings for the trip back to Vermont, she sits in the quiet kitchen looking out at the backyard. She is grateful for the time she has spent out there, holding her infant granddaughter, but she will not miss constantly being reminded that the grassless spot at the back corner of the house is where Etienne parked his motorcycle. How would their lives have been different if she and Etienne had taken that creek house out in Autauga County? They had gotten to the point where they could laugh about the day they became acquainted with the term colored rider. She suspects Etienne felt as she did, that Nathan’s comments had not been really that bad. He was trying to fulfill a promise to his uncle. What person doesn’t have relatives who get them involved in family nonsense?
If they had bought the Autauga County house, she could have gotten rid of the redwood paneling and updated the den. When they were done with the house, they could have sold it to whomever they pleased. More important, Etienne would not have had the money to buy that motorcycle.
Jocelyn wonders what her Scottish great-grandmother would have made of the tornado that crashed through town the year she and Etienne arrived in Montgomery. Until her death, that elderly woman feared the arrival of what she called a North Sea bluster, like the one that drowned her father. Probably she would have said a weather disaster like that so soon after their arrival was a bad omen.
Can it be that two decades have passed since they moved down here? She almost begins to calculate the months, but today the old game depresses her. They hadn’t been married long when they moved here. For the most part, it was a happy marriage. On several occasions she asked Etienne if it was time to consider moving back to Vermont. She will regret not having been more insistent a few years back, when the perfect time would have been the summer before Warner began high school. He, too, said that he was appalled by what some of the neighbors were saying about the fact that Woodhaven High was being integrated. Had she nagged, Etienne might have given in. Perhaps if she had, this bad thing would not have happened.
The Almost Gone
Burlington, Vermont, October 1984
On the wide lawn next to the aluminum-sided building that houses Olshanowsky’s Lawn and Cemetery Ornaments, granite headstones stand in rigid rows like a platoon of foot soldiers.
“This one’s pink,” Warner Peletier tells Andrei Olshanowsky, who has brought Warner to a headstone in the third row.
“Not pink,” Andrei says with a thick Ukrainian accent. “It’s rose granite. The governor’s statuary is this same stone.” Andrei, whose thinning white hair nearly reaches the collar of his shirt, pats the top of the headstone with a hand crisscrossed by bluish veins. “Your mother says you will pick some nice words to put on it.”
Warner drops to a squat and runs a hand over the surface of the headstone. Will the words he penned on a three-by-five card serve as a proper epitaph for his father? On the church grounds after the funeral in Montgomery, a string of Etienne’s former acquaintances seemed eager to tell him something he did not know about his father. Despite the new knowledge, the man still seems as murky as the figure he sees reflected in the glassy surface of the monument.
“If you don’t like that stone, I can get you another model,” Andrei says when they are back inside the building. At the checkout counter, he opens a shiny catalog. “Now, these I don’t have in stock, but it would be very easy to order. Look here, this one is nice. It comes with a solid base.”
The price of the bluish-gray monument is three times the cost of the headstone already selected. “I don’t dislike the other one,” Warner says. “I just think the color is a bit flashy. My father wasn’t a flashy man.”
“Your mother picked it,” Andrei says. “I suspect she knew him better.”
“I guess.”
Deep lines radiate from the corners of Andrei’s mouth as he looks over several papers on the counter. “There’s a mix-up,” he says. “Pretty serious.”
“What kind?”
“Now, the death certificate says Mr. Peletier was white. But the purchase form for the plot says he was black. There’s a mix-up.”
Warner reaches across the death certificate and picks up the other form. Nearby, two women who had been critiquing a terra-cotta angel have gone silent. “I don’t imagine this is a king-size problem, is it?”
“Could be,” Andrei says. “After a flood over in Stowe, a man washed up out of a plot with a headstone that had a woman’s name on it.”
“Not good.”
“Bad for business. Several of the trustees at that cemetery went to jail. Do you have your father’s birth certificate?”
“Somewhere.”
“Good. Mail in the birth certificate and everything will be finished.”
&n
bsp; “My father was from Canada—just over the border.”
Andrei hands Warner a refrigerator magnet with the shop’s address and phone number on it. “Just the certificate and we are finished.”
On the drive home, Warner decides to take a tour of the old neighborhoods. On his return visits here during the summers, he didn’t spend much time downtown. Today, however, as when he was a child in a car going through town, he glances down the side streets at every corner, hoping for a view of the expanse of Lake Champlain.
For a man whom Warner had never seen put a toe in a pool, his father fancied himself an expert swim instructor. That proved somewhat true. Under his father’s coaching, Warner and his cousin could swim the widest stretch of Saint Albans Bay before they were in their teens. But the lessons began with a rocky start. Warner still remembers the day Etienne heaved him into the chilly greenish water in the deep end of the pool at the community center. While his father stood along the edge doing nothing, Warner thrashed about to stay afloat.
Warner pulls his mother’s Volkswagen Scirocco into the driveway at her house and kills the engine, recalling how the pool water stung his eyes each time he sank below the surface. “That wasn’t so hard now, was it, son?” his father said after he had fought his way back to the edge.
Yes, Pop, Warner thinks, it was hard.
A note on the door of the refrigerator says that his mother and his wife, Minerva, have taken the baby for a walk in a nearby park. After mowing the grass and clipping the hedges in the small front yard, Warner goes to the garage in search of other tasks to clear his mind. He finds the motion-sensor outdoor light that he sent to Jocelyn last December as a Christmas present.
With Heavenly Narcissus blasting on the living room stereo, Warner removes the old light switch near the back door and begins rigging the new wiring. Nothing he has heard recently from his mother nor from Etienne’s former colleagues who attended the funeral in Alabama has been on his mind as much as what he learned from his correspondence with his relatives in Canada. Minerva was with him the evening he opened the letter with the Halifax return address. She pulled him out of his stupor to tell him that a photograph had fallen out of the envelope and onto his lap. That evening he was still telling himself that he was not that bothered by the news that his relatives in Halifax were black. But the picture did something to his brain. A young black woman, whom he learned was his great-aunt Luela, stood in front of what the letter said was Basinview Baptist Church. Beside her, looking black herself, was the woman the letter said was his grandmother, Kath Sebolt.
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