What My Last Man Did

by Andrea Lewis

“Same storm I am born.”

  I pictured Philomène alone in the storm, her crippled son coming into the world, her husband leaving it. I thought of my own deceased daughter, Thérèse. Groping for life, failing.

  * * *

  We returned to the hotel, expecting to find Juliette in the dining room. She was not among the guests lingering over café-au-lait and brioche. I wanted to go alone to our rooms, but Christophe trotted behind me like a puppy.

  I opened our bedroom door to find Juliette in a chemise, lying on her back on the bed. Philomène sat next to her, bent over, with the side of her head resting across Juliette’s abdomen, over her womb. She was muttering something, a prayer, I suppose, in French. Both had their eyes closed. The intimacy of their pose infuriated me. “Please tell me what is going on here.”

  Philomène stood up. Juliette struggled to prop herself on her elbows. “Rainer, I am sorry. If you would leave us for a while.”

  “To do what?”

  “I’ll see you at luncheon. Please leave us.”

  “No. This woman is not a doctor.”

  “C’est une cérémonie. Tout simplement.”

  “Damn it, woman, speak English.” There were not going to be any ceremonies, simple or otherwise, in our room at the Caminada Hotel where we came to rest, not to be bullied into back-country mumbo-jumbo.

  Christophe ignored my outburst and climbed onto the bed. He knelt there in the rumpled linen and took Juliette’s hand, pressing it to his smooth boy’s jaw. “Madame is sick?”

  Juliette smiled at him. “Don’t worry, Christophe.”

  “Maman helps you. Maman helps many folks.”

  “Philomène,” I said. “Remove your son from my bed. I am asking you both to leave.”

  “First I will prepare a tea for Madame.”

  I was not accustomed to being contradicted by servants. But Juliette looked at me with such pleading. She knew very well I never refused that look.

  “If you must,” I said. “I’m going bathing.” I went to the wardrobe for my bathing things and was further infuriated when Philomène produced them from a drawer instead.

  “I am with you,” Christophe said, getting his twisted body off the bed. He even took my hand as we passed the stained glass windowpanes on the stairway landing.

  The hotel had a contraption, a cart pulled by mules along a railroad track, to take guests to the bathing beach. The silly thing was filling now with rambunctious children and their large-hatted mothers, and I was in no mood to join them. I set off at a stride. Christophe, of course, claimed to know the best spot for bathing, so again I found myself following him. His beach was indeed lovely, completely deserted, but without the customary cabins for changing one’s clothes. There was nothing for it but to strip down with Christophe gazing at me from beneath those lashes. “Run along,” I said. “Don’t you surf-bathe?”

  He made a face. “For city folks,” he said, but he wandered down and waded partway in, clothes and all.

  The Gulf water, keen with scents of salt and seaweed, enfolded me, warm and buoyant, its turquoise clarity shot through with sunrays and suspended bits of sea life that had—for all I knew—traveled the world to arrive there that morning. I stroked hard into the low swells. For a time I forgot about Juliette and Philomène and the useless cures. When I came out, I found Christophe in the most peculiar posture. He sat in the shallow water, little waves lapping about his waist, his eyes closed in concentration. Then he struggled to his feet and studied the horizon. “Something coming.”

  I found it difficult to be concerned. Under the pale blue bowl of sky, Grand Isle seemed a paradise. True, the breeze was up, but that was a relief after New Orleans.

  * * *

  When I finally did meet Juliette in the dining room, luncheon was almost over and we sat in the big room alone. Juliette looked lovely in her delicate white dress, the dress that would be ruined in the storm. White lace was arrayed at her creamy brown throat and her white satin slippers peeked out from the hem of her skirt. She appeared energized, with a light in her dark eyes that I had almost forgotten. I should have been grateful, but I did not wish to credit the source of this alteration.

  “Are you going to tell me what was going on up there? Do you even know?”

  “She was merely praying for my strength. Many physicians lay on hands, you know that.”

  “She is not a physician.”

  “I thought you wanted children.”

  “I thought we both did.”

  “Will you take my word that I feel better today? Is that not progress?”

  I could not deny she looked well, which had been my deepest wish for months. Now I saw it, I was angry. Juliette was happily eating her entire plateful of shrimp boulettes, even sopping the sauce with her bread like a farmer in from the fields. I gazed at her with admiration and confusion, wishing simultaneously to scold her and make love to her.

  We ordered coffee after lunch. While Juliette put an alarming four cubes of sugar in her cup, she looked at me and said, “Philomène has asked me to visit her, at her home.”

  I suddenly noticed how hot the dining room was. Why had we ordered coffee in this heat? No one on this damn island knew how to make decent coffee anyway. “Juliette,” I said, “I cannot permit that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Let’s go outside. It’s too hot.”

  Juliette did not press the subject of visiting Philomène. She agreed to sit with me on the greensward next to the hotel where guests played croquet or had lemonade and ginger cookies brought out. I took the Picayune, but the breeze was suddenly much stronger, making it difficult to read the newspaper. A few other guests were about. A little boy and girl were knocking croquet balls to and fro. The girl grew bored and wandered over and regarded us, curious, her little laced shoes planted on the grass and her little-girl stomach thrust out. She was a beautiful child and, I realized, about the age Thérèse would have been. Juliette tried to smile, but I saw tears fill her eyes instead. The girl fled and buried her face in her mother’s skirts.

  Juliette pressed her fingertips to her eyes. I feared if people saw her weeping again, as she did on the dance floor, they might come after me with pitch and feathers. “Dearest,” I said, “would you prefer going back inside?” She lowered her hands and shook her head.

  I looked past Juliette, down the oyster-shell track, and saw the unmistakable form of Christophe limping toward us. “Look,” I said, “here is Christophe. He will cheer you.”

  His breath rasping, his dark hair wild in the wind, Christophe said, “Maman say come to our house.”

  “Tell your mother no thank you,” I said.

  “Storm coming. Safer at our house.”

  “Safer than the hotel?” I asked.

  “Safer at our house,” he said again.

  “Rainer,” Juliette said, “please, I’d like to go.”

  “It won’t be a bad storm,” I said. “The hotel is safe.”

  Christophe grabbed Juliette’s hand. “Allons, Madame.”

  Like a jealous lover, I removed Christophe’s hand. “Go along home to your mother, Christophe. Madame and I are fine.”

  * * *

  The evening’s fais do-do was to proceed as usual, although by sunset the wind was roaring about the hotel and treetops were thrashing its roof. After Juliette’s bout of weeping the previous night, we had no plans to attend the dance. But we did sit in the front room of the hotel with glasses of cognac. We stayed well back from the windows but could see trees tossing against the twilight sky. Juliette barely spoke to me. As she swirled cognac round and round in her glass, I feared she was again dwelling on the memory of Thérèse.

  The storm built with breathtaking speed. Darkness fell and then, in a disconcerting turnabout, the skies lightened again as mountains of liquid-silver clouds sped in from the southeast. The first raindrops hit the front windows like bullets hurled one by one from the bulked gray sky. That changed all at once to what seemed like barrel
s of water, one after another, being splashed against the building. The first lightning strike was much closer than I anticipated, illumining the hotel grounds not like daylight, but something much starker. In the second burst of lightning, we saw the phantasmal form of Christophe struggling across the sand-grass in the downpour. The manager tried to stop the dripping child from entering the lobby, so Juliette set down her glass and ran to meet him. “Christophe, why have you not gone home?”

  His thick hair clung to his forehead and streamed water into his eyes. He blinked furiously, his lashes flinging droplets. “Madame, you must come. You must.”

  The first windows to shatter were the stained glass panels on the landing. The wind created pressure changes—I felt them in my ears—that gave the sensation the roof might lift off. Some of the guests fled the ballroom for their cabins or for higher ground. Another group cowered at the back of the ballroom. Twelve of those would perish later that night when the second floor—our bedroom—came down on top of them. I never learned the fate of the family with the little girl we saw on the greensward.

  Juliette allowed Christophe to pull her out, into the driving rain. Amid the pandemonium of hotel guests running this way and that, I had no choice but to follow my wife and the boy. We took the route across the chênière that Christophe and I had walked that morning. How different it all was now, in the dark, with shorn branches flying from trees and sheets of rain drowning the air. Christophe never let go of Juliette. It took all my strength merely to keep up. A willow was down across the path. Before I could lift Juliette over it, Christophe pulled her over the roots, half dragging her by the armpits, not hesitating for a moment. The pirogue, which I had deemed too dangerous that morning in the clear light of day, became our only hope for crossing the rain-pelted black bayou. Christophe poled the little craft unerringly, dredging impossible strength from his crooked limbs. Juliette sat on the center plank of the pirogue, eyes closed, face lifted to the rain and lightning.

  * * *

  At last we did arrive amid the howling wind at Philomène’s house, a stout wooden cabin on brick risers, sheltered in a grove of very old red oak. Those massive trees, I imagined, had shielded the place from many a gale. Philomène leaned against the door as we entered, then shouldered it closed again. Suddenly all was dry and still, and we were met with the tangled aroma of hundreds of medicinal plants. The ceiling was hung with swags of drying herbs, row after row, like an inverted forest of bunched sticks, leaves, flowers, and roots. Most were unknown to me. I recognized chamomile and the citronella leaves Christophe had shown me that afternoon. Swags of garlic and red pepper hung over a cook stove where a pot simmered. On the wall around the cook stove hung two tin washtubs, two dried raccoon skins with striped tails dangling, numerous skillets, pots, pans, and baskets. Filling another wall was a glass-fronted cabinet of small, corked bottles and, next to that, a makeshift altar covered with a white, fringed cloth. Among the many candles flickering there, I made out statues of the Virgin and St. Francis, several crucifixes and rosaries, a Bible, a scattering of what I believe were sharks’ teeth, a dried skin of a water moccasin at least five feet long, a small portrait of an old woman, and a pencil drawing of St. Roch, the plague healer of medieval France. Tiny blue glass cups held crumblings of dried herbs.

  The moment we entered, Philomène made Christophe strip off his wet clothing. This he did after one quick glance at Juliette, who was already moving toward the altar, drawn by the candlelight and icons.

  I had one glimpse of Christophe’s poor back, corkscrewed about itself, before Philomène wrapped him in a rough blanket. She ladled some of the steaming concoction from the stove into an enamel cup for him. He sat at a wooden table on one of the fat oak boles that served as chairs. An old milky-eyed setter, who had greeted us at the door and wagged her tale limply when she recognized Christophe, curled up behind him.

  Philomène and Juliette stood with their hands folded on the altar. I wanted Juliette to remove her drenched clothing but did not dare speak now. The wind was a steady roar, like a locomotive that never stopped passing. The house had no glass windows, merely open-air ones, covered now with thick wooden shutters. Water leaked in and darkened the warped sills.

  Juliette and Philomène prayed aloud, murmuring in counterpoint to the drumming of the rain. I sat across from Christophe. He pushed his enamel cup toward me and I drank the remains of his tea. It was bitter, but I’ll admit it revived me. I looked at Juliette’s thin back in the sodden white dress and suddenly thought of my daughter in her little white coffin.

  Christophe, hunched there in his gray blanket, watched me. The enormity of his accomplishment now settled upon me. I stretched my hand toward him and he took it. His fingers were still wrinkled with damp but already warming and pulsing with his Acadian blood. To think I had tried to bar my heart against this boy. I rose and stepped to his side and clasped him to me where he sat. He was all twisted, trembling bones but unbowed, in his way.

  Perhaps, in my heart, I was clasping Thérèse, whose spirit I had abandoned in my striving to restore Juliette. Perhaps my daughter waited for my attention even now, like that little girl on the greensward. I pulled Christophe closer. Feeble though it sounded, I said merci. He nodded against my ribcage. That small movement pulled some trigger that released a sound from my throat that shocked me. Thankfully, the storm noise almost drowned it, but Juliette did glance at me before returning to her prayers.

  I wept, clutching Christophe. It was agony to picture Thérèse. She took on the form of the little girl playing croquet on the greensward, but it was Thérèse, I am certain. If I had the power, I told her, I would grant her safe passage, such as we had received from Christophe.

  * * *

  Our second daughter, Catharine—the one destined to survive—would struggle into this life nine months from that day, on 12 May 1902, as wild from the moment of her birth as the tumult that night on the chênière. Catharine—we called her Cate—was the child who would inherit my green eyes along with the duskier hues of Juliette’s mother’s skin; who would be at odds with the world even whilst in the womb, and completely ungovernable once out of it; who would reject every refinement and luxury we could offer her—French tutors, dance cotillions, piano lessons, art classes—in favor of running wild through the Vieux Carré and teasing boys on street corners and slipping into dives on Perdido Street to hear old Negresses sing “Black Snake” and going to cockfights, palm readers, voodoo priestesses and Canal Street astrologers; who would run away from Sisters of the Holy Family convent school at age fifteen and turn up six months later in a saloon in Slaughter, Louisiana, singing those same Perdido Street blues shouts, wearing a shiny cobalt dress and already pregnant by the piano player. Oh, her son Louis was a joy, but he barely dampened her never-ending desire to consume whatever she could of this world.

  Sometimes, when Cate was a small child, the confident tilt of her head, with its thick black curls, would remind me of Christophe as I saw him that night, poling his pirogue in the storm. His silhouette against the wet green sky did not look deformed. He seemed the one perfectly formed being in the storm.

  * * *

  A crack of thunder violent enough to wrench open the earth drew us from our reveries. I released Christophe. The dog whined and resettled. Juliette crossed herself. Philomène turned to the stove and ladled another cup from the pot.

  While Juliette sipped the tea and stroked Christophe’s head, Philomène bustled about, eventually taking from a cupboard another blanket and some threadbare towels. These she handed to me. She pointed to a ladder leading to a kind of loft. “Christophe’s,” she said.

  Juliette looked at Christophe, who was almost asleep where he sat. “Mon petit, may we take your room?”

  He looked up, his eyelids heavy. “Oui, Madame.”

  Juliette, her dress still trailing drops of water, grasped the sides of the ladder.

  I followed my wife up the steps.

  5

&nbs
p; What My Last Man Did

  Cate wriggles into the blue beaded dress. LaFitte’s kitchen reeks of boiled mullet, old cabbage, burnt onions. The cook Josiah hacks pork ribs and tells his boy to feed the stove. The blue beaded dress is a gift from Huston—God knows where he found it. Robin’s-egg soie de chine with cobalt beads clicking all down its length. “Blue for blues singing.” That’s what Huston said when he gave her the package, nervous, like a boy in a brothel. She hasn’t told him yet she’s pregnant. She’s almost sure. The mullet makes her want to heave. But no doctor in Slaughter is going to check a fifteen-year-old colored runaway for pregnant, so she’ll have to wait and find a midwife.

  A cockroach crawls across the calendar—July 1917—woodblock of a Shreveport & Texas locomotive gushing steam. Out front, in the saloon, the band warms up. Only Huston on piano is any good. The drummer, Franklin, hopped up on Raleigh Rye, keeps rushing the beat. The bass man, Alphonse, harbors the notion he can improvise.

  The saddest Cate can feel is to conjure up her father. He must wonder where the hell she is. She balls up all that sadness in her stomach, going through the kitchen to the saloon and out to the upright piano. Small applause. Huston beams to see her in the dress. She keeps the sadness in her stomach with the baby and starts “Chain Gang Blues.”

  If only she could sing it like LuLu. When LuLu sang “Chain Gang Blues” it wasn’t so much a singer singing a song as it was the naked soul of a girl carving up her heart for a roomful of strangers. LuLu taught her the moans, curving slurs, bent blue notes. “Like a willow drooping.” Everything else has to come from your gut. Most girls singing blues grew up poor. Cate figures nobody would listen if they saw her parents’ house on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. Near the end of “Chain Gang Blues” she notices Duval is here again. Even in the gaslight she can see his parted hair and Sunday suit.

  * * *

  Wilson Duval, broiling in his best twill, tilts his chair against the wall and watches Cate. She has a new blue dress that looks like a gift from Satan. At twenty-five, Duval—the youngest-ever sheriff of East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana—knows his mission: return Slaughter to the righteous. Some thought he was a joke until he cleaned up The Haze, where all the hoboes lived. Raided the place in April with his idiot deputy. Hauled in offenders, including Cate. First time Duval ever saw her. They thought she was a boy until the deputy knocked off her cap and all this hair spilled out.