by Brian Hodge
And when Christophe could no longer hear him, he — though in the opposite direction — did the same.
Chapter 32
World Without End, Amen
And on the third day she shall rise.
Come back, I want you back. To us. To yourself.
By Saturday’s dawn, Justin was beginning to understand the appeal to mystics of the ascetic retreat, their withdrawal from everything but inner purpose. What a fine line between madness and enlightenment.
In this void, they were now down to hours, knitted of equal parts joy and dread. A fuse was burning, for fireworks, or bombs.
He wandered downstairs shortly after hearing Mama Charity begin to rummage about the kitchen. He sniffed the pits of his shirt halfway down the stairs; definitely gamey. Sometime soon he would set a match to these clothes, to anything that linked him too closely with this past week, a blaze of liberation.
Mama Charity stood at the kitchen counter, prepping the percolator for morning duty. “Coffee for two?” she asked, then gave him no time to answer: “Yes.”
He had to smile, weakly. She’d not done a bad imitation of him at all, the dour rasp roughening his voice lately.
“Thought you’s the alert type, but I guess not,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Somebody sneaked up on you overnight, looks like, and painted your eyes red.” She smiled, poked him with one dumpling elbow, and fired the percolator. “You ever eat anything last night, Justin?”
“I tried, after you went to bed, but … I couldn’t keep it down. Stomach just wants to be left alone, I think.”
“Told you I wouldn’t be charging you for food. Now, you got any idea how rare it is something like that comes out of my mouth? Least you could do is make me sorry I ever said it.”
“Maybe later.”
She was teasing, of course, striving for a levity it was obvious she didn’t feel. There was an unpleasant desperation in her tactics he could scarcely bear to watch, as if she were on uncertain ground with someone too far beyond the reach of her skills as healer, confessor, priestess.
Justin banged out the back door, down the small porch to pass a few moments on the lawn, and simply breathe. Overwhelmed by the rawness of this virgin day, still struggling to be born while birdsongs cascaded from every giant tree. Drifting mists pooled over the lake in sluggish currents, and he wondered if he could ever again tolerate such wild desolation without fearing it. Its implications, how little he — anyone — mattered in the grand scheme. He suddenly ached for Tampa asphalt, its radiant burn. There, at least, he could lose himself within the hive, where one and all found it easy to fool themselves into thinking there was purpose.
Mama Charity joined him with two steaming mugs, and gave him one. How long could a human being live on coffee, anyway? Certainly he was well into some experiment here.
“Where do you think they are, by now?” he asked.
“Who’s that? Napoleon and Christophe, you mean?”
“And the rest.”
She sighed, a great breathy sound, with a weariness of age she seemed to generally conceal. “Far away, I hope. Far, far away.”
During last night’s round robin of farewells at the door, Justin realized he had never been made to feel quite so aware of his race. Not by anything said, or done; it was something the others probably were not even aware of. But he was the minority, and what an eye opener it had been. Years ago, once he’d gotten over the early adolescent prejudices that seemed so prevalent among Midwestern boys learning how and whom to hate, he had always believed that race didn’t matter.
But it did, at least in terms of common ground. These three — Mama, Napoleon, Christophe — were linked by a heritage whose most sorrowful aspects lingered in exploitative pockets even now. And as two of them stood ready to go eradicate at least one such holdout, Justin knew he could never truly empathize with what they must have been feeling … for it was not part of his lineage. He’d gone upstairs with a sense that he didn’t wholly belong with them at this moment. It should be theirs alone.
Far, far away, Mama had hoped.
“So do I,” was all he could say.
“Christophe, he’s supposed to call me at the shop come Monday, let me know how they made out. Never was much on wishing my life away … but I do wish that day’d get here.”
Now there was a feeling he could share.
“April said Christophe told her that he thought he’d go back to Haiti. Because he felt he should. Can you imagine that? The way things are in Haiti now?”
She nodded into her mug. “Don’t surprise me none.”
“Whatever he decides to do, I wish him more luck there than I had here.” He stared across the lake, lost within its mists and distances, as if he were seeing his own digested years. “When I was twenty, I wanted to change the world. When I was twenty-five, I wanted to buy it. I’m thirty now. And I just hope to God I can survive.”
“Well, don’t you feel too bad,” Mama Charity told him. “You learned a lot sooner than some.”
Vigil’s end came shortly after noon, announced quietly by the twitch of fingers and eyelids, and the stutter of audible breath. It sent Justin to his feet, then to the bedroom door.
“She moved!” he shouted down the stairs. “Get up here, April moved!”
He returned to his post beside the bed and found that he could no longer bear to sit; too much tension, his bones would shatter the chair. He knelt, while from the stairway came an onrush of heavy wooden creaks and groans, a counterpoint to the fits and starts in which April was beginning to move.
Mama Charity entered in time to see April’s mouth open wide, with chest hitching, as if she were drawing a resistant breath. Limbs taut and trembling, she arched her spine, head grinding slowly back into the pillow. Justin started to reach for her but Mama grabbed his shoulder.
“Give her a minute to work it out,” she said. “She’s not moved on her own since Wednesday, she’ll be stiff.”
Moments filling hours, these pains of birth and restoration, a metabolism slowed to levels nearly undetectable now winding back up to what he hoped, prayed, would be normal. Her eyes were still clenched shut, and her lips looked dry, chapped, despite his efforts at keeping them moistened. Justin dipped two fingers into a glass of water, then dabbed them to her mouth.
He spoke her name and went ignored. She coughed, she twisted; drew quickening breaths as if hyperventilating, or having a panic attack. He could stand it no more, and leaned in to touch her shoulders. Only then did her eyes flare open, for a moment blinking against the light, and when they met his it was with only the most rudimentary recognition. Justin clutched at her all the more desperately and it was the worst thing he could have done, for April began to wail, and dear God hadn’t the most heartwrenched prayers he’d offered in his life been enough?
April’s hair went tossing about her face, whipping into his own, and Mama Charity leaned in with soothing grace to be rebuffed as well. Four hands to restrain two, while bedsprings screeched, and hope choked on its own deathrattle.
“Okay, let her go, let her go, Justin,” Mama said, “one of us gonna hurt the other or her if we don’t.”
Release, like the tearing of a heart in two, and April calmed after a moment, if only in her physical frenzy. Justin sagged to his knees on the hardwood floor, watching as she rolled onto her side to draw into a fetal position, her hands cold and palsied as she brought them to her face. Her head, thrashing a moment, and words slipped past her lips in a collage of references only she could understand. Ants, wind, teeth, worms, rot, laced with greater nonsense, flashcards of miseries concealed. Weakening, every muscle jellied, he locked his elbow to keep from slipping out flat upon the floor. Here, at last, was the final price of his fool’s errand, the inescapable cocoon wherein his soul was to be dragged through an arena of cinders. Long may it bleed.
On the bed, April calmed into tears and mutterings, and Justin looked up from below into Mama
Charity’s face. She who was making peace with her own obsolescence.
“Is somebody else,” he said with effort, “doing that to her?”
And he was a believer, oh yes, he had witnessed the effects of manipulation from afar. Such comfort it would bring to think these were the puppet strings of another, that could be cut. But what hellish circumstances these were, then, to wish her so vulnerable.
“I …” Mama faltered, tears beginning to slip down her cheeks. “I don’t think so.”
She lowered to his level, taking care to keep her balance, then slipped one arm around his shoulder, her hand clutching the side of his head. He allowed it, didn’t fight, not because he truly longed for this meager comfort; more that he feared he might never be this close to anyone again.
“Poison, remember,” she murmured into his ear, “and sometimes … sometimes … even if they do get left alone … they don’t always wake up the same. If they wake up at all.”
You win, a fractured offering to someone beyond the window, to Mullavey or to God or to devils unseen, obscurely named. Perhaps they’d all had a hand in this, and was there rejoicing in their realms? Likely there was. Their triumph was so devastatingly complete.
“Let me go,” he whispered, freed himself from Mama Charity’s arm. He dragged the chair back beside the bed, where April cringed at the scrape of wood on wood.
And he sat, as he had for so many hours before, as if by sheer force of will he could erase the damage of toxins barely known beyond tiny third world corners. Sitting, waiting for some sign.
Later, by minutes, by lifetimes: her eyes upon him, focusing, seeing him. Him. He knew, just knew, a fragile straw that meant everything.
“Can you … see me?” he whispered.
Eyes huge in an eerie calm, locked upon him as if for the first time. “Jus?”
He nodded, biting his lip, he would not cry. “Yes.”
“Jus?”
With teeth clenched as tight as his stomach, “I’m here.”
“They don’t stop,” and her voice cracked high, tormented.
Tears, he could not hold them back. “What doesn’t?”
April, ignoring this, or not hearing, gasping once and seizing his hand, to press it to her heart. Its beat was as frantic as a caged bird.
Her voice, again, breaking: “Jus?”
His own, likewise: “I love you…”
“Kill me,” she whispered. “Kill me.”
She found refuge in the corner, later, and as near as he could tell, some measure of peace. Recognition, awareness even, these seemed to come and go with cyclical unpredictability, and he could no longer endure the confines of this house.
Keys unearthed, the rental car — he could drive it faster than he dared, until he became one more component, losing himself in union with machine. Wrap it around himself like armor, or wrap it around a power pole, fate would decide. Yes, because fate was so impartial.
He left great clouds of exhaust and dust in a wake he could never outrun, and was it any surprise when he looked at the seat when nearing the causeway and saw the Taurus nine-millimeter bouncing along for the ride? It had grafted itself to his hand so inconspicuously back at the house.
He returned to New Orleans, and if fate had decided, it still chose to take familiar avenues through this city of strangers. He parked high in the French Quarter, far from the river, where casual visitors rarely bothered to tread. Where shabby buildings wore their age and abuse without disguise, and so did the people. He belonged here, in this blighted gallery.
Justin left the car, and the Taurus had found its way beneath his untucked shirt, snout-first into his waistband. The narrow streets, where so much history had been written and amended, were endless, a world of possibilities. He walked them quickly, as if he had purpose. It would be his joke on them all.
Fate’s intervention, or perhaps merely the currents of pedestrian traffic: He found his way to the St. Louis Basilica, its steeple a beacon over Jackson Square, and before its pale gray face he stood in solemn realization. Hadn’t he left Mama Charity’s house in a search for some higher power to lean on?
He would try anything, appeal to any celestial court, and entered the cathedral’s cool, dim world. A narrow lobby, with racks of votive candles burning to his right, and their price list. He ignored the cost, preferring to visualize a god in no need of a cash box, and lit a candle for April. Standing over its flicker, with a silent prayer, and he then passed through the heavy doors into the sanctuary.
It had been built to dwarf the mortal, with two rows of Doric columns down the center. Along each side wall were five arched windows of stained glass, darkly rich hues depicting a medieval tableau: a regal, sword-bearing divinity bestowing blessings upon the sick, the mercantile, and the fellow holy, while forever accompanied by his contingent of disciple knights, Crusaders of the red cross. Lurid statues of angels, saints, and martyrs further guarded this hushed shrine to ecstasy and fear.
And he wondered, might not his simple prayer get lost before it even found its way to the ceiling?
Confession time, Saturday afternoons only; he’d noticed that on the sign out front. Four confessionals stood ranked across the back of the sanctuary; absolution is only a conversation away. He looked at his fellow pilgrims — were they all tourists? — wondering what sins they numbered among their ranks. I looked upon a stripper with lust in my heart. I was drunk at the time.
He pushed the curtain aside at the far confessional, drew it behind him and fell to his knees. These claustrophobic walls could never have heard from any sicker a soul than his own, and dear God, may he leave here with something of value, or at least some deadly impulse purged.
“Bless me, Father,” Justin said. “I think I’m about to sin.”
“How long has it been since your last confession?” The priest was a vague shape on the other side of the screen, with a voice of indeterminate age.
“Never,” he whispered. “I’m not Catholic, I just need…”
“I see.” The voice drifting through the screen seemed melancholy. “What sin are you contemplating?”
Justin drew the Taurus from beneath his shirt, wrapped in both hands, so comfortable there. Natural. “I want to kill someone. I want him to suffer. I want to watch.” When there came no reply, he went on, unable to disguise the pain in his voice. Would tears rust gunmetal? “He took … my wife’s mind. Away from her. She’s still alive, but … but he killed her anyway.”
Cathedral silence, then: “Will his life bring her mind back?”
“No, you know it won’t, we both know that, it’ll just make me feel better.”
“For how long?”
A violent sniff, and he wiped his runny nose with the back of his hand, sagged against the little shelf. “I don’t care.”
“A year?”
Justin snorted with a small wet laugh. He’d not expected this. “Probably not.”
“Less than a year, then,” the priest mused. “You’ll need to feel better again. What will it take next?”
He laughed again, so weary his bones ached. “I don’t know, don’t know … don’t … know.” Drying his tears, with a mad laugh waiting to burst free at some point, after which, perhaps, he might collapse and never rise. “This guy’s an evil man, Father. You can’t have any idea what a favor to humanity his death would be.”
“Let me grant that you may be right. But judgment doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to God alone.”
Choking through laughter — the Almighty, what markets he had cornered. “I just want my wife back, the way she was. I want her whole again. She worked so hard to be who she is. Was.”
“Believe in miracles. They happen every day.” The priest turned, a hazy outline through the screen. He leaned in closer. “Is this your home? New Orleans?”
“No.”
“Then go home. Where you’re needed, and wanted. I can tell you to try and forgive, but even with the help of God you may find that difficult. But you can go
home. And someday, your heart may find forgiveness. Much more easily than you might find it to forgive yourself for taking another life.”
I’ve already done that, he could tell the priest, and so far I feel clear on it. He held his tongue, in favor of other things he wanted to know. He slid down to sit on the confessional floor, his back against its wall.
“If I promise not to kill him,” he said, “do you promise to answer a question for me?”
“If I can.”
“You said miracles happen every day. Do you believe that God causes miracles to happen, and prayers to be answered, through ordinary people? At least some of the time?”
“I do, yes.”
“If that’s the case,” said Justin, “then why not the wrath of his judgment? And don’t tell me that’s not the way it works, don’t you dare. Because with what I’ve lost, what she’s lost … we both deserve a hell of a lot better reason than that.”
He waited, eyes burning and blurred, and even to his own nose he reeked of exertions and despairs beyond measure. Pity upon the next sinner to drop to his knees on this floor.
When he left the confessional, the priest still had not spoken.
Fate’s decree, further wanderings taking him to his car, then past it. There were no answers to be found in the French Quarter, none anywhere, and with his intentions now spoken aloud to a stranger who could never betray him, Justin supposed he’d known this all along. But in miracles he could believe, miracles of both light and darkness, and if he had witnessed only the latter, it still didn’t mean the former could never happen.
And even if they never did, if false comforts could be found in meaningless ritual, then rituals he would seek.
He crossed North Rampart and Basin, wide boulevards of a modern era, back in the real world and bypassing the human decay of the homeless, the transient. This modern world he left behind once more when he came to the St. Louis Cemetery, and entered its pale walls.
This crumbling necropolis, a maze of tombs where the dust and bones of the long-dead were pushed aside to make room for the new. Entire families in a single vault, on occasion, generations resting atop generations. He had been here once before, years ago, with a guided tour group, during some convention for a career he supposed he’d given up. Then, as now, he was struck by the age, mausoleums so old that mats of ragged weeds grew from their roofs. The final irony: They slept below ground here after all.