Cajun Waltz

by Robert H. Patton

  They retreated to separate sides of the bed. At length he asked, “Gonna tell me why?”

  “A wife needs a reason?”

  “A daughter kinda do, day like today.”

  “Not one no more. Could be that’s why.”

  Dusk in the window signaled the end of a long day. Richie pictured the fresh-laid slab on Leopold’s tomb going dark on this first night of many. A baby’s yelp in the nursery startled him. Esther began to get up before falling back on the pillow. “Help’s here now, I forgot.”

  “Who she again?”

  “Sallie Hooker. Told you ten times.”

  “Surprised you went with a colored.”

  “She’s half only. Bayou gal. Up from trouble, lookin’ for better.”

  “You know some man got to do with it.”

  “Long as she’s straight now.”

  “Ain’t like we need her,” Richie said.

  “I’m back the store tomorrow.”

  “Your father did not want that.”

  “He’s got no say anymore, God rest him.”

  “I don’t want it neither.”

  Esther tucked against him. “Don’t start, Richie. Not after such sweetness.” One breast lay huge across his chest. Moments ago he’d been trying to inhale it into his mouth. Now it made him feel queasy.

  “You know he seen a lawyer.” Esther rose on one elbow as Richie spoke. Her blond hair framed her face and he appreciated how flawless her complexion was up close. This accounted for his hesitation, as of a gently applied knife, when he added, “’Bout me takin’ over the business.”

  After a pause she said, “Please tell me that’s a lie.”

  * * *

  LEOPOLD’S WILL STIPULATED that Block’s proceed under Richie’s control with Esther as a limited partner. When the children turned twenty-five, they would share in the operating profits or the net proceeds should the business be sold. Abe Percy, wearing his usual linen suit with a pastel shirt and matching pocket square, explained the terms to Richie and Esther in his office.

  Richie had expected to inherit the store outright. In his mind he’d already sold it and banked the money after leaving, as he saw it, a fair fraction to his wife and kids; now he’d have to stick around to gather his cut piecemeal. Esther saw betrayal where her father had seen tradition. “I don’t understand how he can reach out the grave and make me do what he wants even then.”

  “You could file an objection with the court,” Abe said.

  “Kinda shit is that?” Richie said. “You wrote the will, now you wanna tear it up?”

  “I say it because I wrote it and because it’s a fact. I warned Mr. Block that churches and government can mandate perpetual property rights, but not always individuals.”

  Esther clasped Richie’s hand. “Then we’ll fight it.”

  Richie pulled free. “Your father had a right—”

  “Block’s is my right!”

  Richie turned to Abe, a fellow man in the room, like-minded and sensible. The lawyer acknowledged, “Be hard for her to prevail without your consent.”

  The subsequent silence said everything. Richie talked anyway. “I run it. Kids get it. Wife stays home.” He turned to her with the calm of a man holding aces. “Like Papa wanted.”

  “Let me just work the store like I always done.” Tears came. “You need me there, you’ll see.”

  It occurred to him she was talking sense. “Long as I’m boss.”

  Her sniffling quieted.

  “Make suggestions, okay. No opinions.”

  She nodded.

  “Because I will be the goddamn boss.”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “Whatever I want.” Richie pointed at Abe. “You heard it.”

  “I did.” Overweight himself, Abe had sympathy for Esther on many levels, marriage to this grabby hayseed heading the list.

  “Little test,” Richie said. “We been callin’ her Justine, don’t ask me why.”

  “Her? You mean your daughter.”

  “Well, that’s just it. I wanted Bonnie, but I got overruled at the time.”

  “Because you were out drinking,” Esther said.

  “I’m talkin’ to the lawyer here.”

  She lowered her eyes. Abe hurt at the sight of it.

  Richie went on, “And I cannot get right with Justine. Bonnie’s my girl. Miss Bonnie Bainard from Lake Charles, USA.”

  “You’re saying you want the name changed,” Abe said.

  “In the paperwork, yes I do. Make it official here on out.”

  Abe looked to Esther. Her face was splotchy from crying earlier, as if slapped by a clumsy master. “Justine was my mother’s name,” she said.

  “Then surely out of respect—” Abe began.

  “No,” she cut in. “Bonnie’s fine.” Abe saw that she had little choice but to feed her husband this concession, but that she felt obliged to sweeten it with “In fact I like it better” made his heart sink.

  “See,” Richie grinned. “I was right all along.”

  Abe leaned back in his chair. When Richie took Esther’s hand in a possessive grip, Abe’s gaze was there to meet hers as she mutely begged him to pity her plight. Recognition lit their faces too tenderly for Richie to notice. You could say Abe and Esther found each other at that moment, as friends rather than lovers—but either way, for life.

  * * *

  WITHIN A YEAR of taking over Block’s, Richie opened stores in Shreveport and Baton Rouge, closing the latter after a few months but opening three more around the state in 1937 and 1938, when the worst of the Depression seemed past. Tailoring their wares to the needs of each locale, he otherwise patterned the establishments after the original. The sign and outside façade were indistinguishable among them. Even their staffs were alike. Richie hired female managers, an idea he got from watching his wife run the main store while he concentrated on the big picture. He judged candidates on the basis of his image of Esther. Salesmen needed charm and brass. Managers had to be diligent, organized, and invisible. Like her.

  He let underlings do the daily retail slog while he hobnobbed with bankers and local bigwigs, a crowd he was pleased to discover enjoyed a drink and a laugh same as him. Esther planted herself at the Lake Charles store, squeezed into her father’s old rocking chair with a ledger in her lap, monitoring accounts from throughout the Block’s chain. Richie did the hands-on management, driving store to store in a canary Packard, striding in slick as a Federal agent and peppering staff with questions supplied by his wife. His black workers out back in the storage yards enjoyed his banter and the dollar bills he put in their hands. Whites in the front showroom remained gratifyingly cowed. His wife urged him to fire weak performers, but at worst he only cut their wages. Letting them keep their jobs allowed him to think well of himself and less of Esther, the heartless sow.

  Neither had any touch for parenting. Richie’s affection for his daughter began with her name, “Bonnie Bainard” meeting his ideal of the saucy all-American gal that any daughter of his surely must be. Esther’s sense that the girl was a sourpuss was closer to the truth. The genetic misfire that caused Bonnie to shoot up in height to where she stood a head taller than the tallest boys in her class didn’t help. Being neither cute nor popular despite belonging to one of Lake Charles’s most successful families was bound to promote a glum attitude.

  Her brother R.J. was more personable but rare to show it, a genuine loner but for interaction with the nanny, Sallie Hooker, who stayed on as the Bainards’ live-in help as the children grew. Sallie, out of fondness, mistook R.J.’s quiet for introspection and his time spent with her in the kitchen and laundry as showing sensible regard for her hard-won country wisdom, rather than what it was, a way to hide out from his family. R.J.’s one certifiable virtue concerned the money she mailed each month to her home in Hancock Bayou down on the coast, the purpose of which, she let slip one afternoon, was to help her daughter being raised there by Sallie’s mother. It didn’t occur to R.J. to ask
about the girl’s father, but Sallie told him anyway. “He gone. Dead in a ditch.”

  “Fell?”

  “Or got push. The drink done it either way, you can bet.”

  R.J. was too young to give this fact its full due. But keeping secrets was natural for him, and, compelled by Sallie’s grave expression, easy in this case.

  * * *

  RICHIE WASN’T ONE to mark turning points or reflect on the past. His memories of the war in 1918 meant no more to him than the steak he had last night or the whiskey he shortly would quaff. A whore, afterward, was the same as his hand, and the esteem of his family was less a factor in maintaining his mood than having a nice automobile to drive and at least twenty bucks in his pocket at all times. But in the summer of 1938 he received two jolts that put him in mind of regrets and desires not even a new car could assuage. It felt like the hand of fate in action, spurring him to better his life while giving pardon in advance for any outside hurt it caused. Like a dog that somehow learns to read, Richie underwent a miracle. A simple man became less so.

  It was a Wednesday in August when Joe Falcon entered the Lake Charles Block’s with a guitar in one hand, a suitcase in the other, and a length of rope looped around one wrist. Richie, who rarely came to the store and was only there to get some petty cash out of the register, recognized him at once despite the musician’s thinning hair and ratty suit. Joe’s singing partner Cleoma Breaux walked a few steps behind him. Richie wouldn’t have recognized her if they hadn’t been together. Her hair was a tangled bird’s nest and she wore an ill-fitting dress and dirty tennis shoes. She carried a baby of maybe six months in the crook of one arm, carried it with unnerving vigilance, like a girl so afraid of dropping her doll that she almost breaks it from squeezing. Cleoma’s free hand gripped the rope tied around her waist, by which Joe led her as if on a leash.

  Richie stood behind the store’s front counter. Joe dropped his end of the rope to the floor and stepped on it while he opened the guitar case. Cleoma continued past him with a rapt expression until the rope tightened and tugged her back like a balloon on a string. Richie wondered what had happened to the lively girl with the knowing smile he’d met ten years ago. Her gaze drifted to his. “Mes compliments,” she said before looking off elsewhere. He felt sick to see such strangeness.

  “My wife tell that to everyone,” Joe said. “She mean only kindness by it.”

  “You got married,” Richie said.

  “We acquainted?”

  “I seen you two play. After ‘Lafayette’ come out.”

  “Them days done.” Was this a reference to Cleoma? Richie regarded her worriedly, taking in once more the vacant gaze and rope around her waist. “Hard times,” Joe said, reading his thoughts. “Same as everywhere.”

  “True that.” Richie’s suggestion of shared struggle rang false even as he spoke it. The Depression hadn’t touched him. His life had never been easier. “New baby?” he asked to fill the space.

  “Lil girl, yes sir. Lulu. Near lost ’em both right after she born. Wife snagged up her shawl in a Greyhound door. Drug her a quarter mile, her holdin’ the child whole time.”

  “You pullin’ my leg now.”

  “God’s truth. Lulu, not a scratch. Cleoma took the hurt.”

  Richie looked at her again. “Seem okay now.” He looked harder. Brain damage, plain as day. Retarded. He’d met her only once in his life, still it horrified him to see what bad luck had dealt her. “Damn.”

  The rope around her waist was the obvious next question. “She wander some,” Joe explained. “Forget what she about. Not on Lulu. With Lulu she sharp.”

  Richie shook his head in utter sorrow. “You got a heavy load.”

  “Oh no, we fine. Grateful every day.” Behind his glasses Joe’s eyes told another story. He set the guitar on the countertop. Richie recognized Cleoma’s National resonator, fingerboard ebony with pearl inlays, its metal body polished, cut with a pair of tapered f-holes, and etched with magnolia blossoms. Joe, watching Richie’s admiring eyes, ran his hand along the neck. “She make a pretty noise, I guarantee.”

  Joe’s drawl returned Richie to that evening backstage at the Pinefield Auditorium when he and Walter Dopsie had watched Joe and Cleoma perform “Allons à Lafayette.” Walter had translated: Man wanna marry his girl even he know she trouble. A love song that Richie, it occurred to him now, could never sing on account of his voice and whatever else about him was broken. “Still got your accordion?” he asked.

  “Still got me, better to say. But the National no need, so here go.”

  “Not interested.” Esther had lumbered up from the rear of the store. It was the exact wrong person for Richie to see. He hated her right then. It had nothing to do with her size. He’d reveled enough in her lushness to know it could work him up every bit as much as the skinny girls he paid for in East Lake Charles, though they were available whereas Esther, by mutual indifference, no longer was. “Block’s don’t take consignments,” she told Joe.

  “Prefer a straight sell anyhow.”

  “We’re not a pawnshop here.”

  “Forty’ll get it. Worth double at least.”

  “It’s not about the money, sir.”

  It was the “sir” that set Richie off, so upright and professional. Plus he’d had a couple drinks, it being past noon. He banged open the register, removed two twenties, and thrust them at Joe.

  Esther whirled on him. “Dammit, Richie!”

  He slapped her hard with his open palm. A first for him, it felt and sounded perfect. She buckled but didn’t go down. Her eyes filled from the sting and her cheek burned red around the redder shape of his hand. Store patrons gaped in shock. Down the passway to the storeroom Richie saw his nine-year-old son and daughter watching with frozen faces, Bonnie taller, her head a brunette bulb on a stalk, R.J. wiry like his father but on the way to being handsomer thanks to his mother’s blue-blue eyes. Richie marveled at the coincidence of the family all present to see this. It confirmed that a crossroads was at hand.

  Esther’s friend, the lawyer Abe Percy, pushed through the Block’s front door carrying a stewpot wrapped in a towel. The pot held whatever kitchen concoction the two were sharing today. Both liked to cook. Lunching together on obscure recipes was one of their pleasures, others being coffee and pastry each morning and tea and more pastry each afternoon. Abe froze midstep as he took in the scene.

  “Mes compliments,” Cleoma chirped to him, the greeting now as spooky to Richie as a talking skull. Her baby started to fuss and she jiggled it. Something unseen beckoned her and she ambled after it down one aisle until the rope gently called her back.

  Abe rushed to Esther, setting the pot on the counter and putting his arm around her. “Essie! What’d he do to you?” Only now did she begin to cry.

  Richie’s first thought was that the food smelled good, some kind of pepper stew. His next thought was a notion ludicrous but usefully rude: “Essie? Whatsat, lil pillow talk ’tween you two?” He felt the eyes of his children shift between himself and their sobbing mother.

  Abe glared at him. “I told her it was only a matter of time.”

  Joe laid the two twenties on the countertop and started to put away his guitar. “Keep the money,” Richie snapped. “And the National.”

  “Ain’t lookin’ for charity.” Joe pocketed the bills, left the guitar, picked up his suitcase and led his wife and baby out the front door. Cleoma waved airy good-byes to all. Through the store window, people inside saw her husband kneel on the sidewalk to untie her. Their business at Block’s concluded, he took her hand and led her down Ryan Street to catch a bus going wherever, forty dollars to the better in the quest to rebuild their lives.

  Esther stopped crying. A shopper picked up an item in a show of considering to buy it. Richie lifted the National’s strap over his head. Though he hadn’t played in a decade, the G chord came instantly to his left hand; it sounded awful when he strummed. R.J. sidled over to see the guitar up close. On impulse he silence
d its tuneless clang by grabbing the neck in a wraparound grip. His thumb clamped the strings to the fingerboard. When Richie strummed again, the sound was beautiful.

  The boy let go and his father plucked a perfect G chord with open strings. “I’ll be damned. Open tuning. That’s a colored thing.” For a moment Richie lost himself in playing, sliding his left hand in a flat bar up and down the neck, sometimes dragging a finger to turn a major chord into a sixth or seventh, fluid touches he’d never tried in his days with the Ramblers. His rhythm took a shuffle pattern as a melody returned faintly to mind. R.J. had never seen his dad with a guitar, had no idea he played. Richie’s dreamy expression made the boy not nervous to be with him.

  Richie paused and looked around sheepishly. “‘Nigger Blues,’ give or take. Walter be proud.” That no one knew what he was talking about sharpened the revelation that struck him: his present life stunk and change was required.

  He handed the guitar to R.J. “Pawn it or play it. Yours either way.” He beckoned Bonnie, who froze when he reached to embrace her but relaxed when it proved benign. Richie opened the register and gave her two twenties. “R.J. get the guitar, you get the cash. Been thinkin’ you got a head for business.” He’d thought no such thing but wanted to make the gifts even. “Turn it double, I bet.”

  “Bribing their loyalty,” Abe said. “How touching.”

  “Best you not address me or my kids,” Richie said to him. “The wife you can talk till you’re sick of it.”

  Esther’s face had begun to bruise. Richie caressed her shoulder. “I am sorry. I’ll try never to do that again.” He clapped his hands to conclude the matter and she flinched as if from a gunshot. Only Abe, his arm still around her, realized Esther was trembling.

  All this was preamble to the second jolt that hit Richie that summer, the first half of a one-two punch that softened him up to the idea that coincidence doesn’t happen by chance. Seeing Joe and Cleoma brought low by misfortune seemed a sign meant directly for him, a warning to get out and get satisfied while he still could. He wouldn’t hesitate when the chance came.