She stopped, shaking her head as she reached down to stroke his cheek, once, lightly, with her fingertips. “No, I'm lying a little bit about that part. I wanted to fool them, fool a St. Claire and New Orleans, like I was fooling the whole world, making them pay for all their signs and their laws and their blindness. Making them love me. And I wanted to take up the dare, too, Day. A double dare, to see if I could get away with it. But then Charles found out. My sister told him. My sister, Lucille.”
She had lost herself in thought, but her hand was stroking his face again, over and over, and he didn't want to go beyond, to the next place, where she would tell him how Charles, like Julius, had to die. “Don't,” he said, but she failed to hear, or perhaps to understand.
“Julius,” she said, and her voice broke over the name. “He had been broken by knowing what I was. But Charles was still Charles. I used to think there was nothing akin to softness anywhere in Charles, no part of him that was vulnerable, but he was. Once he told me that I seemed to him like a sad book he'd read and loved a long time ago. It was Lucille he was thinking of when he looked at me, when he lay with me, although he never knew it until the very end. He loved Lucille, I think as much as he could love anyone. The night he learned the truth, he came to me drunk and high and furious, but also strangely excited, exhilarated. He said he was going to tell everyone, everywhere, that the most beautiful woman in the world, this woman they'd all been worshiping for years, was a Negro and then, oh, how he would enjoy watching them all jump and squirm. He was laughing about it, and then he hit me. He raped me, and then he started crying like a child does, beating his fists on the floor. And then he left and went out to the shack.”
A strange smile was pulling at her mouth now, a smile born of hurt and tenderness. “And here you are, Day, still thinking that I followed him out there, that I followed him out there and killed him.”
“It doesn't matter,” he said.
She reached up and pressed her fingers against the hollow of his throat, as though to feel if he still lived. “Yes, it does. To you it would always matter. I understood how much it mattered to you that night you came to arrest me, when I turned from the window and saw your face, saw what was in your eyes as you looked at me. You looked at me as though you were seeing the gowman come to take away your soul.”
“The gowman,” he repeated, and that was when it all suddenly came together in his mind, the pieces meshing like fine gears, while he knelt there on the floor of her bedroom with the fog pressing against the windows and the blood draining cold from his heart.
The Mardi Gras mask, and the chips of white enamel and the purple spangle under the nail of Charles St. Claire's severed finger.
LeBeau seeing a creature in white with snakes for hair come flying out of the slave shack on the night of the murder.
Katie walking in her sleep that night, seeing the gowman, Katie telling him over and over how she had seen the gowman in their house on Conti Street.
“Oh God. Katie.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
EVEN BIG SINS BEGIN WITH LITTLE DEEDS, SO MAEVE Rourke's mother used to say. Her mother, who had chosen to end her life with the slash of a razor. So had she thought, in that moment before she made that first cut, of all the other moments and little deeds and choices that had gone before?
There were moments with Reynard, in those early years, when Maeve truly believed she had everything she'd ever wanted. When she found out she was with a child by him, she had even more. There is a moment when a child comes out of your womb, that very instant of birth, when you feel a surge of pain that is like a death, a moment when that child is separate from you, and yet still a part of your body, and that moment stays with you forever. Your child is born, lives, maybe even dies before you, but that moment is always a part of your heart.
She was so pretty, was little Maureen, the prettiest thing you'd ever hope to see and hold and snuggle up to. With all her fingers and toes and wide, bright eyes. You couldn't see it at first, what was different about her, but then the days passed and you couldn't not see it—her skin, her hair and mouth and nose. On the day when the truth was first spoken aloud between her and Reynard, when the truth was faced, he had stared down at his baby daughter, his Negro baby daughter, lying in her bassinet, and he'd had such a look on his face, as if he were seeing all their sins come to life.
Maeve had pushed past him and snatched the baby up, her fingers digging into the blankets so hard that little Maureen started screaming with fright and pain, wrapped the blankets up tight around the plump flailing legs, and went and sat with her in a chair by the window, holding her close, so close. “Go away,” she said to Reynard. “Go away.”
She sat in the chair, rocking back and forth, back and forth, her eyes looking through the window. The shutters of the house across the way shone with a new coat of paint. A man with a banjo sat beneath the tin canopy of the saloon on the corner, playing a lively jig for pennies. Sunshine made rainbows in the puddles left from that morning's shower, but for her there was no light in all the world, and she was cold.
It was that time of day when you can sense the night is coming even though the sun still clings to the rooftops across the way when she heard Reynard's step coming up behind her. She wanted to tell him to go away again, but she didn't. He knelt before her, putting himself between her and the window, so that she would have to look at him.
“You can't keep her, Maeve,” he said. “You'll destroy me if you keep her.”
She knew that. She knew how it was in New Orleans, how it would be for Reynard if the world were suddenly to learn that underneath his white skin, colored blood was pumping through his veins.
“I've spoken with the laundress,” Reynard was saying. “Augusta Durand. She has agreed to take the child and raise her as her own.”
She is mine, Maeve wanted to say, to insist. But she did not.
On the day they buried the empty casket in the St. Louis Cemetery, in the Lelourie family tomb with the name MAUREEN carved on the stone, it occurred to her that either she would have to forgive him or she would have to stop loving him.
She'd wondered why he hadn't accused her of sleeping with another man, a colored man, but then he told her about a story handed down through the years in the Lelourie family. About how his granddaddy had fallen in love with a slave girl and brought her here to this Conti Street house, lived with her here, until he had been killed in a duel. “I must come down from her, from this house,” Reynard said, his face twisted with shock and horror and a strange kind of wonderment. “I've a Negro's blood. A slave's blood.”
It became after that as though a cancer had invaded him. She would come upon him looking at himself in the mirror and she knew he was searching for traces of the disease. How have I changed? he would say to her, to that face he saw in the mirror. I have the same heart and mind and soul. What has changed?
She would come awake in the middle of the night and he would be standing naked at the window, and he would say, as if to himself, I wonder what became of her? And Maeve knew he was thinking of the slave girl. They took her baby, she wanted to say back to him, and it broke her heart—that is what became of her.
There was an outbuilding in back of the cottage where the old kitchen had been, with rooms above where the servants and slaves had slept. He would spend hours in those rooms, and after a time she began to feel a fury with him that was like a knotted fist in her belly. What was so weak about him that he couldn't find a way to live with it? For him she had given up all her babies, Paulie and Day and their little baby girl, who had a new name now, Lucille. Every one of her babies she had given up for him, and she had found a way.
One evening, after he had been to the outbuilding, he came into the parlor where she was reading, and he had a cane knife in his hand. The blade was rusted and pitted black, and dull from being buried in the root cellar beneath the old kitchen. “The way my family always tells the story,” he said, “is that when my granddaddy first saw her,
she was cutting cane in a field.”
Later, Maeve saw that he had cleaned up the knife and sharpened it.
It was when she and Augusta were washing the abortion blood off of their daughter's legs that they first thought of killing Charles St. Claire. That man had almost been the death of her, of their Lucille. He was destroying the life of their Lucille and killing her babies. It would only be justice that they kill him.
Justice and atonement.
They played a game with cards, high card winning, to let God decide who would be the one to do the actual deed, and Maeve was chosen.
Maeve did not intend to die herself, though, or to go to prison, and so she and Augusta prepared, they thought it through. How it would be done, for the method of execution ought to be a fitting one. How they would keep from being found out.
Of the two of them, Augusta was the better at planning. She thought of the cane knife, and the white cape and Mardi Gras mask—that distinctive Medusa with snakes for hair—should anyone happen to see them that night.
That night the air was alive with sounds. The locusts screeching and the frogs croaking down in the bayou, the wind rattling the leaves of the banana trees, leftover rain dripping from the eaves.
Augusta had come up with a plan to lure him out of the house, but in the end he had come out on his own, crossing the yard to the slave shack.
Maeve followed him.
She waited for a time under the shadows of the oaks that were like pools of dark glass on the lawn, and then she went around to the side of the shack where the bedroom was.
She took off her white cape and hid it in the bamboo thicket, where it would not get bloodied, the white cape Augusta had made from a sheet stolen off the laundry line of the bordello next door to the house on Conti Street.
She took off her white cape and underneath she was naked.
She climbed through the window and went to the bed. She sat on the bed, behind the drape of the mosquito netting. Her breath steamed beneath the mask she wore, making her face hot, but the rest of her was cold, so cold. She waited until she felt the moment come upon her.
She listened to him moving around in the other room. Once she heard him laugh. When the moment came, she gripped the cane knife tight in her hand and rose up from the bed, and she went to him.
She swung the knife at him, over and over, cutting him, killing him, killing him, killing him, killing him.
The cypress trees were wet and black in the yellow light. Fog clung to their flooded roots and hung from their bare branches like strips of wet cotton. Daman Rourke pushed the pirogue through the grass and cane, his ears straining, hearing nothing. Miles of water and marsh and drowned cypress trees, and they could be anywhere.
He told himself that Maeve loved her granddaughter too much, too much, to ever do her any harm. But the heart is never rational when it comes to your child, and so he felt as though he were moving deep underwater and he had no breath left, and that he was never going to live through this.
He felt a touch on his thigh, saw Remy's face floating before him in the mist. “We'll find them,” Remy said. “She's only doing what she said—taking Katie out here to convince her there is no such thing as a gowman. No matter how frightened she is of being found out, she would never be able to hurt Katie.”
He breathed, nodded, but he was seeing Charles St. Claire on the floor of the slave shack with all those bloody gashes in his dead, white flesh. She had done that.
He heard a rustle and a splash, and snapped his head around so hard his eyes blurred. He saw a white crane rise out of the marsh, with wings gilded gold from the unearthly light.
Katie, always walking in her sleep. She must have been out in the hallway that night, come awake for half a moment and seen her grandmama leaving her bedroom wearing the Mardi Gras mask and something white, and she thought she had seen the gowman, and he hadn't believed her. She had told him, but he hadn't believed.
A great wailing cry floated to him on wisps of fog, followed by a splash, like a body hitting the water, and in that moment Daman Rourke finally found his limit, found his stopping place, found that sharp, black edge where the fear was more than heart and soul and blood and guts could bear, and hell ceased being a figment of your imagination, and became the place where you burned.
He pushed the pirogue toward the scream, praying, begging God, making oaths and promises and vows, awash, drowning, dying by fear.
He saw the bow of a pirogue appear out of the white, sun-spangled mist. He thought it was empty and then he saw her, huddled in the bottom with her knees drawn up under her chin.
He nearly fell into the water himself going for her. He wrapped her up in his arms, hugging her so tight he felt the breath push out of her chest.
He heard someone sobbing and he realized it was him.
“Grandmama fell into the water,” Katie said.
He pulled back just enough so that he could grip the sides of her head and look into her eyes. They were full of tears and fear, and he crushed her up against him again, crushed her against him until her chest was pressed to his throat and he could feel her breath hitching, hard and fast, as if she had the hiccups, but alive, alive.
She put the flat of her hands on his shoulders and pushed away from him. “Daddy, you need to go look for Grand-mama.”
“I will, honey,” he said. “I will.”
They searched for her through the thick green water and the clinging, sucking stalks of marsh grass. They never found her.
We are all haunted, thought Daman Rourke, by the demons of choices made badly many years ago, both by ourselves and by those who came before us. You can never really know another's heart. It's all there in each of us—all the good and all the evil in the world. We only differ in the choices we make, and in the end we must make those choices alone.
He would never know for sure all the whys for what his mother had done. He thought that the same love-born fury that had driven her to take the life of a man by slashing him to death with a cane knife had in the end been what had driven her to spare him and Katie and destroy herself.
Lafamille.
He knew that he would never stop wondering about her, and about what parts of her he carried inside himself.
One evening the four-o'clocks opened up in the shade of the levee, and the breeze had just a touch of coolness to it, a promise of the end of the hot days of summer. On that evening he and Katie and Remy bought some cartons of shrimp and dirty rice and took them, along with his saxophone, to the houseboat on the Bayou St. John. They ate and drank from a jug of sour mash, and when the sky grew dark enough for the first star to start its shining, he picked up his sax and sent a deep sweet note floating out over the water, and Lucille put all the pain into a song.
He looked at Remy's face, pale in the light of the dying day, the dying summer. Growing up here, he thought, it's so much a part of life you don't even see it. The signs on the drinking fountains, the screens in the streetcar, all those places they aren't even allowed through the door. They live among you, cooking your food, cleaning your houses, rocking your babies to sleep, and you don't see them. Until that day the “they” becomes you, or the ones you love.
LeRoy had been right. You live in the world and either you just don't see it, or you tell yourself there's nothing you can do and you let it go. But LeRoy had also been wrong. You can change what is. Somehow you have to figure out a way to change what is.
Later that night, in bed with her lying in his arms, he said, “Be my wife, Remy,” and she cried and then she said, “It's against the law for a white man to marry a Negro.”
And he said, “Laws in this city get broken all the time.”
He pulled his arm out from underneath her so that he could rise up and look at her face and kiss her mouth, and he thought that he would never leave her, no matter what.
One morning in October, when the sky was a hard, crisp blue and the smell of woodsmoke was in the air, a postcard arrived in the mail, bearing a Brazi
lian stamp. On the front was a photograph of a woman sitting on a rock, looking out to sea, with her back to the camera's lens. On the other side was printed the address to the house on Conti Street and nothing else, but then nothing else was needed.
A son would always know his mother.
More Penelope Williamson!
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WAGES OF SIN
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Chapter One
New Orleans 1927
TONIGHT, HE WOULD WRITE TO HER with his own blood
He'd been planning the letter for some time now, ever since this one movie that he'd seen: a spectacle film where a Russian peasant girl lay dying and they brought in the doctor to bleed her. The director had shot a decent close-up of the lancing blade piercing flesh, opening up a vein into a bowl, and then the optical effects guy had doused the camera lens with blood. They'd probably used pig's blood, but on the par speed film it had looked like ink and that was when the idea first came to him. About how he could warn her by writing to her with his blood.
Not that he had bothered with giving much of a warning to the others, hadn't really given them a chance to save themselves. Fuck ‘em. They wouldn't have listened anyway. Always, when a new one was first chosen, he'd feel some hope that this time it would be different. But after he had watched them for awhile, after he'd looked into their hearts and seen the real them he always came around to accepting the inevitable: that even death couldn't redeem the hopelessly lost.
And yeah, okay, okay, sometimes he did go ahead and fuck them anyway before he killed them. It was only sex, after all, and he was never selfish about it. He always tried to make it good for them, too. To give them a few moments of sweet pleasure, however fleeting, before that big postcoital sleep.
Anyway, the others…call them small sacrifices of appeasement, if you will, because ultimately she was the only one truly worthy of salvation. She wasn't a chosen one, she was the chosen one, but she was also his one. She was his love, his destiny, the only reason he had for drawing breath. So it followed, ipso frigging facto that if killing her was the only way to save her, then he'd have to kill himself as well. They'd have to die together, just like Juliet and her Romeo.
Mortal Sins Page 42