by Eden Butler
But now we weren’t’ kids. We were moving toward something that I couldn’t name and in the middle of all that, there were those curious, searching eyes and the people dead set against anything that would keep Dempsey and me together. They hated us. They hated who we were and who we wanted to be even if they didn’t understand why. It was the way of things, for good or bad and who were we to change the way the world had always turned?
I slipped into the shop, wanting to curl up and disappear, wanting the world to blow away until there was nothing left. But before I got my wish, Mama came in after me, slamming the door on Dempsey, on all the prying eyes, on all the swirl of hope and despair and want, and I knew that the world would never go away, but would pull me down right along with it.
Mrs. Matthews had not died, not yet. Mama likened her to an old rooster strutting around, teasing death because she was too ornery, too stubborn to give the reaper even a hint that she was ready to leave this place. I wanted to be like her one day, when my hair was white and thin and my eyes had gone all snowy blue.
There was a whopper of a storm brewing, the sick breath of it raspy in the wind as folk all around the city made their plans. Some would stay, wait it out, not fearing what would come because something always did, so why run. Some had already left, more vexed by the calmness in the air and the low silence that had grown throughout the city over night, it seemed. The calm before the storm.
For her part, Mama thought it best to keep me hidden in Treme’ where neither Joe Andres nor Dempsey could find me. I knew her worry. It was the same as mine but that didn’t mean I was altogether happy that it was Mrs. Matthew’s place, too small already for her and Bobby, that Mama locked me up inside. Everywhere I went, or thought of going, Bobby went too. There was no easing away from my little chaperone, and I had to listen to her ask a million damn questions about my brother and what sort of girls I thought he’d go for.
By the third day and another dang round of “oh Sylv is so…” I cooked up a plan to break away from my annoying shadow and get on with heading back to my mama’s shop, worry and danger be damned.
I just couldn’t take the questions, the worry and yet another interrogation about my stupid brother. Who, it seemed, had disappeared right from the face of the earth. He, at least, hadn’t been hidden in Treme’. Sylv, I bet, had gone on back to Mama’s shop, running orders and cash with Uncle Aron like the world was not rattling and spinning to an end around him.
I could stand a little rattling myself but it seemed the only dang thing in my future was yet another round of dominoes with Bobby and more readings from the Psalms to ease Mrs. Matthew’s worry over her own end coming. And the storm, that had blown in with a vengeance.
Bobby’s voice was monotone and thin as she read the Scriptures, like a bristle of dandelions in a storm, but I did my best to keep from judging her. She was, after all, reading to her dying grandmother.
“For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to destruction.”
Even in that low, even tone, the verse was a nice thought. The wicked would be punished, so the Lord promised. Men who lied and hurt, like Ripper. Men and women, like Dempsey’s parents, who struck out in hatred to reign in their own child with violence. People like Joe Andres who thought the world and those in it were here for their own sick needs. All, according to Scripture, would be handed a dose of justice. They and their destruction would not be looked over. They would not be protected in the end.
Would we?
My mama was making hooch and selling it to drunks and whores. She did make some to heal and help, but was that enough? Sylv snuck into Lily’s room when her house was settled and dark so he could kiss her and touch her like it was just something to do because he’d got the notion to do it. Did that make my mother and brother wicked? Did the bad they did get cancelled for the times they were good?
It was a thought that came heavy on my mind as I listened from the front porch of the Matthews' small house as Bobby kept on with the Psalms, reading louder now to be heard over the storm. I wasn’t thinking of much but how we’d all be dealt with when our time came. I wasn’t even worrying over the wind and rain that fell onto the street around that small cottage in buckets and sheets.
Then, out of nowhere, there came a chill with that wind and something dark and listless fell over me. A feeling took root inside my belly and stayed there as Bobby’s voice went on with no movement in the sound at all. That feeling kept my eyes unfocused and the chill on my skin the lower Bobby’s voice sounded and the heavier the whip of wind and rain came down around me. The feeling that something was going to happen. Something bad.
I blinked, trying to bring myself from the sadness that took over. That’s why I didn't notice the hunched form darting toward the house, rail thin but tall. His slacks were slicked snuggly around his thighs and the umbrella he held was broken on one side.
“Sookie!” my brother shouted, giving up on the umbrella and throwing it to the ground when he reached the Matthews’ porch. He waved quickly, his long, slim fingers like the flaps of a flag. “Come on here, come now!”
Sylv tore off his wet jacket, holding over both our heads when I met him in the street, huddled close and already dripping as he led me away from the Matthews' cottage, down toward the front side of Treme’.
“Uncle Aron got one of those fast and loose ladies from the brothel to give us a ride out of the city.” He pulled me closer toward him when a thick band of rain and wind sloshed against us. “Mama wants to head on to Atlanta. The storm is getting too bad, folks say the levies won't hold and it's gonna drown us all.”
“She’s a little late,” I said nodding toward the line of cars and trucks already backed up, horns blaring with stragglers hanging off the back cabs and bumpers like rats on a sinking ship. “The traffic will be stupid.”
“Well, at least we’ll be headed in the right direction.”
We passed another line of cars, these with damn fools not giving a single care to the corners of the streets where the police huddled together watching the crowd weaving out of the city.
I didn’t like the look of one of them policemen especially. He had pock marks all over his face and a mean little frown bunched under the sparse mustache he wore. Him I’d seen more than once sniffing around when Uncle Aron and Sylv walked ahead of me, to clear the path from busybodies that might be curious about what I carried in my basket.
“What about Bastie?”
“She caught a ride from cousin Ethel. They’re head out toward their kin in Virginia.” When I didn’t say anything, Sylv glanced down at me, putting his arm around my shoulder. “She’s snug as a bug.” I snorted out a laugh and my brother stopped walking, moving his chin down. “What is it? You look vexed.”
We started walking again after Sylv caught my head shake but he pulled me closer, weaving us through the crowd with glancing this way and that to keep a look out for anything worrisome that might headed toward us.
“I don’t like it. Leaving,” I said, waving a wet hand at the crowd and weather. “Something’s percolating. More’n just the storm.” A heavy shudder took over my body then and I fought to push it down. “I feel deep inside.”
For a second Sylv watched me, pulling me from the street and the screeching tires of a rusted Chevy when it came too close to the sidewalk. “Aw, hell, girl, you just mooning over Dempsey Simoneaux.”
Until he mentioned Dempsey I hadn’t exactly put my thoughts on him. He’d slipped in and out of my concentration while I stayed with Mrs. Matthews. It was his smile mostly and the memory of his sweet, full mouth that kept me wondering how he’d fared since Mama sent me to Treme’. I’d spent most of my nights worrying that his daddy had decided Dempsey was a liar and went at him with a belt for talking against Joe Andres.
“You hear anything of him?” I asked Sylv, not caring when he rolled his eyes like I was stupid for keeping my thoughts on Dempsey. When my brother ignored me, I pulled him off the si
dewalk to huddle next to me under a broken awning with sheets of water spilling from an opening between two thick boards. Not like it made much of a difference. We both were soaked. “Tell me what you’ve heard.”
“I ain’t seen him.” Sylv tried ringing out his jacket, cursing to himself when a big splatter of water fell onto his head.
“You lying to me.”
“Damn, Sookie, so what if I am?” He threw down the jacket, giving it a kick for good measure before he jerked me back onto the sidewalk. “The both of you are itching for trouble, courting it like it won’t be ruin of both of you.”
“Sylv…” I waited, ignoring his stupid try at changing the subject.
“I ain’t seen him at all since Mama told him to get…”
“But?”
Two fat hustlers, I suspected some of Ripper’s old henchmen, walked in front of Sylv, eyes narrow, gaze heavy on the pair of us as we headed into the thick of the Quarter where everyone seemed to be leaving. But we waved them off, more worried about the weather and getting to Mama and Aron in time than over two fat bullies who I bet couldn’t keep up with us if we was to take off running.
“Sylv,” I said when we glanced at each other, silently deciding we needed to hurry down the sidewalk.
He didn’t look at me when he spoke. “Bastie said she saw a whole mess of Mr. Simoneaux’s white men all gathered together this morning when Ethel came to get her. Policemen too, and not Parish either. They was New Orleans cops.”
“Did she see Dempsey?” I watched my brother as he moved through the crowd and didn’t like how light his skin looked just then, as though something set in his throat and he didn’t want to let it out. That look on his face made something thick and knotted clot the air in my throat.
“No,” he finally said, taking my hand to tug me along quicker. “She said she hadn’t seen him for a week.”
Dempsey was the sweetest boy I’d ever known and he was the only one I’d ever let get close enough for a kiss. I thought maybe, despite the hurry in our steps and the wild noise around us, despite the trouble we were likely all in because of his daddy, that maybe, if our world had changed, that Dempsey would be the boy I’d get a chance to be with. Maybe forever.
We made it two blocks from Mama’s shop where the sidewalk was thinner and the crowd moved slower. I followed Sylv without really thinking of where we were going or why the streets were filling up with water. It sloshed around our ankles as we scurried.
“Sylv…” I started, pulling on his arm to make him stop but my brother’s arm tightened and his whole body went straight as the blade of a knife.
“Son of a bitch.” Sylv didn’t curse often. Bastie had always made sure we kept our tongues civil, but just then, watching wide-eyed as a few blocks away Mr. Simoneaux and a half a dozen policemen stormed into Mama’s shop, I thought maybe Bastie wouldn’t mind so much.
Things went muddy then. Dark and thick as though the water around us came straight from the Manchac and not the Mississippi. Sylv took off, running toward Mama’s small shop and he got tussled and pushed back as Mr. Simoneaux stood next to a large truck with a shotgun on his shoulder and Joe Andres at his side. As I got nearer and spotted Uncle Aron and Mama screaming at three policemen, wrestling with them as they fought the rising water on their calves and the men screaming about prohibition and illegal contraband, I could just make out the shape of a boy sitting in the cab of Mr. Simoneaux’s truck.
“There’s that little bitch.” I could only guess that I was the little bitch Joe Andres pointed to because as I made my way toward Mama who was still fighting with the policemen and the rising water, Mr. Simoneaux and Andres cornered me. “What you got to say for yourself, gal? You gonna tell those policemen how you attacked me? How you tried stealing my wallet when I’d had too much drink?”
He wasn’t worth the argument, a fact I thought was plain when I darted around him to follow my Mama and Uncle Aron, just as they broke away from the policemen.
“Run, baby. Run fast.”
I didn’t know where Uncle Aron was or how I’d gotten ahead of him. I didn’t know if Sylv followed or where it was Mama was leading us. I only knew that the rain came so hard and fast now I could only make her out by the black hem of her slip as she dashed ahead of me and those long, red nails as Mama reached out her hand.
We came to some building I didn’t recognize, and slipped right in. There were tarps that covered the broken windows and wooden crates stacked up ten feet along the inside. It smelled like mildew and dirt and of the sweat and rain that came off me and my mama’s skin and hair.
“Keep still,” she said to me, pulling me next to her as we hid underneath a wooden stairwell with more tattered tarps and half broken crates. She moved her head, nodding at the burned smudge in a circle around the foot of the staircase and I wondered, trying to distract myself from the race of my heart and the shake that took over my hands and fingers, if this was where drifters came to rest when nights in the city were cold and rainy.
Outside, the rain drown out most of the noise, but Mr. Simoneaux’s voice carried and I heard my brother crying out, begging for something I could not hear.
“If we’re still and quiet,” Mama promised, her voice in a whisper, “maybe they’ll go away and give on up…” She said it like she meant it. At least for a few seconds. Her rare smile was big and broad, like she thought it might give me a little comfort. Maybe make me feel less hopeless than I did just then.
But my mother knew same as me that they would not give up. Not when they felt they were justified and men like Mr. Simoneaux and Joe Andres always thought they were justified, especially when they were doing the devil’s work. And it must have been the devil’s work, else how would it have been possible to start a fire when Noah’s own storm was raging outside.
The smoke started to billow before we realized what was happening. Sylv’s voice was panicked and loud and I swore I heard someone else, a different voice not my brother’s pleading for things I couldn’t hear.
“They’ll come out,” Mr. Simoneaux said in a voice meant to carry and there was a whole lot of laughter in that promise. “Don’t you fret, they’ll come on out.”
The smoke got thicker, billowed wilder and Mama grabbed me, led me to the opposite side of the room where it was a bit clearer, her eyes wide as she hurried around to the windows, yelping when she tugged down a tarp and saw Joe Andres on the other side with a gun pointed right at her.
“Come on out, gal. Come on now.” There was tobacco between his teeth and the same greedy spark in his eye that had been there the night he ripped my shirt open. “Don’t you make me say it again.”
When I started to cough, because the smoke had gone black and one side of the building had gone up in a hot, bright flame, Mama pulled me along with her towards a set of rickety stairs that led to a platform in the direction of a catwalk on the second story. A large opening way high up the wall of the building, probably meant for offloading, was broken and open to the elements, with a large chain bolted to the crossbeam above it. Climbing those sagging stairs two at a time, Mama held tight to my hand, thinking, I guess, that if we got to the roof we could jump to the next building. But from the platform we saw that the catwalk up ahead dropped off in the center with only that long chain stretching high enough to reach the broken window.
“You little enough, Sookie, I want you to climb up there.” Mama’s voice was wild, broken as she screamed over the sound of the flames, fighting off the coughs that wracked her lungs. She pulled off the kerchief that had bound up her hair and wrapped it around my nose and mouth, trying to smile at me through the smoke, trying to give me some courage. “You can make it, baby. I know you can.”
“Mama, no. I can’t.” I glanced at the broken window, some two stories above the ground. “It’s too high. It’s just too high.”
She shook me then like a rag doll, her fingers clawing into my arms. “You listen here to me, girl. You get up there and climb that chain.” I hate
d the way her voice cracked. My mama was strong, tough as nails. In my whole life I never seen her cry or fret over nothing. Now she went at me like she was desperate, like she was near to begging me and my mama never begged for a thing in her life. “You might fall, you might make it to the building across the way, but you will not burn up in this building.”
Just then, a back draft swooped up the side of the building. There were shouts and voices from below screaming at us to get off the stairs and out of the building. But the fire had gotten too thick and all the lower windows and doors had been engulfed with flames. There was no way out save by going up.
My mother let out a wet sounding cough and gasped, getting to her knees to breath air that wasn’t a cloud of smoke, but there wasn’t much of anything in that building except that dark, deadly air. She pushed me, hard, toward the opening and the rusted chain that hung from the rafters above. “Mama, I can’t leave you!”
“We ain’t got much choice, baby.”
She looked up at me then, her face dark, eyes red rimmed and watering and it was all I could do to remember what she wanted from me. She’d called me baby. She’d never done that before in all my years. My mama wanted me out of that building. She pushed me toward freedom and breath and safety. My life mattered to her—she wanted me to live.
“Mama…”
“Go, Sookie. You go on now.”
I turned to look at the opening above. There was so much smoke I could only make out the streak of dull silver from the chain hanging down.. Mama had gone quiet behind me but I was too scared to look back, trying to desperately screw up my courage while the world fell apart around me. I heard and felt the boards under my feet groan, and in desperation, I jumped toward that chain, locking my legs and hands around it, swinging off the half-fallen platform just as it creaked and broke in two, spilling down into the dark below. Mama went down with it.