Roadwalkers

by Shirley Ann Grau

  “It don’t have a home. We are looking,” Charles repeated, “but we just plain need a place right now.”

  The doctor shook his head. “I do not have the facilities, you must understand that. If you have described it correctly, the child is going to need a great deal of attention. Even if I could find a bed, and I can’t, the hospital does not have the staff to deal with that kind of patient.” A puff of wind blew another round ball of warm onion-tinged air from his body.

  Sam said, “Keep it here.”

  The doctor’s shoulders rose; the flesh of his neck covered his shirt band.

  “My family live here.”

  “That don’t matter none.” Sam settled himself on the porch railing, a thin scarecrow outline against the pool of light at the street corner. “This kid needs fixing”—his voice grew very soft—“and we can pay you, which is a lot more than most, I bet.”

  “I do not take patients into my home.”

  “Oh man, I am tired and I am hungry and my temper is kind of short.” Sam put one foot up on the railing. “We don’t want to be in Niggertown any more than you want us here. We are asking you to do an act of charity, act of grace, the preacher used to say back in the days when my daddy made me go to church. Treasure in heaven, that’s what you get. Along with the pay. And Mr. Wilson ain’t about to question your bill.”

  The doctor’s hand reached for the doorknob and held it. Silent. Listening. Considering. Denying.

  Sam said, “We are trying to be reasonable, man. We are just asking you to do what you went to school to learn to do.”

  The doctor’s hand twisted the knob of the door; it made a small tinny rattle, but the door stayed closed.

  Were his wife and children behind it? Charles wondered, all of them gathered closed up against the wall, listening.

  “Doc,” Sam said, still softly, still quietly, “you get called out at night, I bet. You feel safe riding around? You feel safe coming home?”

  The doctor took his hand off the doorknob. “You are threatening me.”

  “Me?” Sam laughed, a happy little boy laugh. “I’m just saying that things do happen. At night. In the dark. There’s one hell of a lotta dark in twenty-four hours. And you sure make one big fat target.”

  “I will not be threatened.”

  “Doc, I am only warning you against the dangers of the world. Which are manifold, the preacher used to say on Sunday.”

  “I know what you are doing.”

  “Come on, man,” Sam said. “If there was another nigger doctor, we’d try him, but there ain’t. You are all we got.”

  Sam stood up; the porch boards creaked under his weight. “Just think how happy that kid is gonna be. I reckon it’s some time since it’s seen the inside of a house.”

  The doctor said slowly, “I cannot do this.” But the conviction had gone from his voice.

  “Just give me a hand now”—Sam started down the steps—“and we’ll have it in your office without no fuss at all.”

  The doctor followed him, unwillingly, as if he were pulled on a string.

  Charles thought admiringly: Sam did it. I couldn’t have, not any of it.

  Sam was chuckling, deep rich sound. “You take good care of it, Doc. This here is a very valuable thing, it is worth five whole dollars.”

  Charles parked the truck at his kitchen door. It was near midnight. The house was dark and as silent as the fields surrounding it. Cora and the two boys had gone to bed hours ago. They’d be sleeping soundly, no longer worried about bricks crashing through windows.

  He clamped both hands on the top of the steering wheel and rested his forehead on them. Skipping a night’s sleep didn’t use to bother me, he thought.

  He straightened up, took a deep breath, shook himself all over like a wet dog, got out. But the one memory stayed with him: the child’s eyes, empty eyes, like an animal’s. Trapped. Resigned. Withdrawn. Indifferent.

  What did I do, he thought, what did I do?

  The night was cold and dry and perfect. The first winter night of the year.

  And what about that other one, the one who’d got away, run off with pellets rattling down around him like steel rain. He couldn’t be badly hurt, not with the heavy brush and the number-nine loads in the guns. He could just pop the pellets out with his fingers, if he was hit at all. He would have spent this day running and hiding and looking over his shoulder. And now it was a cold night to be without a shelter.

  Charles shivered and pulled his jacket tighter. His face tingled with frost.

  A boy, but what kind of boy. Alone, homeless and wandering, but carrying the child with him. Letting himself be burdened. Keeping it, protecting it, and, at the last, fighting for it.

  Well, Charles Tucker thought, that boy wasn’t burdened anymore. He was free. He could go anywhere his feet and his cleverness took him. Travelling light, with just himself to look out for.

  Charles Tucker, hands jammed deep in his pockets, stood on the gravelled driveway outside his kitchen door and studied the stars overhead, red and blue and white, bright and dim, millions.

  And couldn’t stop thinking: Maybe the boy had loved that little one, whatever it was. So he’d be alone now and grieving.

  But why should that bother me? There were as many poor as there were stars in the sky overhead.

  Charles Tucker felt strange and excited. Afraid, as if something terrible had happened. Confused, as if he were lost.

  But nothing had happened. And this was where he belonged. This was his house; his wife and his children were asleep inside, all covered against the dark.

  But still, he was missing something. As if somebody inside his head was talking to him—urgently, intensely—in a language he didn’t understand.

  He stood outside his house, in the cold night, and listened. To the sounds of the world around him: frost-burned grasses rustling, winter-stripped trees settling their roots deeper into the soil, stiffening their hold against the cold. To the sounds of the earth whirling through space. To the stars that rattled like ice as they paraded across the sky.

  THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

  RITA LANDRY WAS CLEANING the entrance hall at the Sister Servants of Mary Home for Children. She began, as she always did, with the statue of the Blessed Virgin on its pedestal in the middle of the floor: a careful dusting, then a slow soap-and-water wash.

  She had been told to sing the Credo or recite the Hail Mary while she did this—that it would be pleasing to the Virgin—but she hadn’t yet memorized the Latin words, and this morning she couldn’t seem to concentrate on the prayer. Her mind kept skipping from thing to thing: the sound of traffic in the street outside, a beam of light filled with floating swirling dust motes, thumps of plumbing in the walls, the tread of rubber-heeled shoes overhead.

  She was sixteen, not yet a novice, and happy in convent life: the quiet orderliness, the way each day was planned precisely, each hour filled with duties. She liked the way nuns’ habits rustled, the way linen headdresses smelled of sun and fresh air and blueing, the way shiny starched white bands circled black faces, so that they seemed to float in air. At times, though, content as she was, she marvelled at the events that had brought her here. She was from the country, from the Little Mirassou River country, cane and cotton and sweet potato fields, wide as an eye could reach. Until six months ago she’d never thought about becoming a nun, never once. Her mama decided for her.

  “Put you on a clean dress, you,” her mama said one afternoon, a hot summer afternoon with the cicadas calling a dry-bones song from all the chinaberry trees. “You and me, we go to have a talk with the priest. It is time we think about the future. You are going to be a nun.”

  Rita Landry jumped with surprise. She had thought, when she thought at all about her future, that she would go on day after day, living in the house where she’d been born, until she found a man.

  That was the way it had been with her two older sisters. Louise married Al Abadie, who was a good man and worked in the rice
mill in Menton; they lived in a nice house with his married sister and her children. Ursula, her other sister, married Jack Bourgeois; a year later she left him and took the train to Houston. She sent a postcard saying that she’d found work in a hospital and was living with a doctor’s family, taking care of their children in the evenings. A few months later another card said she’d married a man named Luis Fernandez and they were moving to California. That was the last they heard from her.

  But there is no man courting me, Rita Landry thought, though I am nearly sixteen years old. No one waves to me from a fishing skiff on the river, no one passes on the road and stops to lean against the fence and talk while I feed the chickens or hang out the washing. Perhaps there will never be such a one.

  “We go now,” her mama said.

  They walked through the vegetable garden and across the road, dust ankle deep. Her mother did not hurry; her heels plopped into the dirt with steady thumping thuds. From the porch her father, tobacco plug in his cheek like a swollen tooth, watched them go. Watched them all the way down the road, and never turned his head. He could do that, rotate his eyes, like a horse almost. Once he shot a yellow stream of tobacco juice through the broken place in the porch rail.

  Nothing disturbed the old man her father. A year ago, when the last baby was born, he sat on the porch and rocked while Rita tended her mama. The baby was healthy and strong, but it was a long while before her mother was able to work. She’d labored so long and bled so much the mattress soaked through to drip on the floor.

  After that Rita Landry hated her father, hated him so much that her hands shook when she brought him his dinner plate. Her mother didn’t seem to mind, or expect anything different. After all, Landry was already old when they married. She was his third wife and her children his third family. He spent all his days on the porch, rocking. Every month he walked down the road to the post office in Vauchon’s store to pick up his pension check.

  Her mother muttered to herself as they walked. Past the church to the rectory. Up the steps and through the kitchen to the parlor where Father Gautreaux waited for his supper. The radio was playing, its cord plugged into the overhead light fixture.

  Her mama stood there, big and tall and heavy, hands on hips, bare legs planted on the floorboards, thick yellow nails on wide bare black feet. “We come here,” she said, “account of my child. She wishes to become a nun.”

  Slowly, reluctantly, the priest switched off his radio. Outside, the cicadas were still sawing out their song. A cat was calling softly; her kittens must be somewhere close.

  The priest began talking to her mother. His soft monotonous voice was as dry as the cicadas’ song.

  Father Gautreaux was a good man; some people even said he was a saint. Every Christmas, no matter what the weather, hundreds came to the church to receive his blessing. Exactly at noon, when the oldest of the altar boys rang the bell—small flat sounds like hammers on a tin roof—the crowd stopped its rustling and shoving, grew silent and fell back, opening a path. The bell stopped, the church doors opened, and the priest walked slowly through to a shell mound at the edge of the river. (People said it was an Indian holy mound.) Stiffly, helped by two altar boys, he climbed to the top. He paused for a count of fifteen—the crowd counted with nodding heads—before he lifted the hyssop and hurled holy water high in the air: to the north first, then the south, then the east, and finally the west. He did this three times, sending up showers and sprays for the winds to carry—to keep away sickness and death and bad luck, to defend fields and boats against wind and storm, to turn aside floods, to restrain rivers in their banks, to give fishermen good catches, and farmers good crops.

  The priest looked very small and very old, white hair like mold on his head. The sunlight gave his black skin a dry powdery look, as if he were covered with dust.

  One year the sky was dark and pocked with lightning, and the rain fell in heavy sheets, straight down. The little priest paused at the door. “Ahhhh,” he said, very softly, like a breath slipping away. “Ça grimaze. It drizzles.” And then his small feet began their trip through the mud to the white shell mound by the river. The altar boys hunched against the rain and flinched against the lightning, but Father Gautreaux seemed not to notice. People said later that the real miracle was that the wind did not blow him away.

  “Your daughter wants to be a nun?” The little priest sounded surprised.

  “I have said so.”

  “She has a vocation?”

  “I have said so.”

  He nodded, rubbing his hand over the top of his head. He would look into it, he said, blinking rapidly. Yes. Someone would know. He would ask.

  “Then I go to fix your supper,” her mama said. “Right now. I hope you have a good appetite.”

  Because the old man her husband’s pension wasn’t much to live on—not with the bootlegger coming every week, and the old man sending down to the store for a Nehi almost every day—Mrs. Landry worked as housekeeper for Father Gautreaux. She cooked his dinner and cleaned the house—there were four rooms—and she swept out the church and put flowers on the altar when she thought about it. She didn’t get paid much, but she did get food. Whatever the priest ate, she and her family ate too. And Father Gautreaux was good at finding food, begging or threatening, one way or the other.

  Whenever he went into Vauchon’s grocery, he reminded everybody there that he was a man like them with a stomach to feed. Every few months, regular as clockwork, he went to Buster Tebo’s farm, always being careful to arrive when Mrs. Tebo was alone. After an hour spent praying with her—she was an invalid who no longer came to Mass—he gave her three or four holy cards and she gave him a bushel basket of food. The little priest smiled happily as he staggered under the weight of her gift. Despite her wheelchair, she was a fine housekeeper; the vegetables she put up were as good as fresh, her hens the busiest layers in the parish, her pigs the fattest and the tastiest. Edna Tebo smiled too, as he blessed the house and fields with a wide cross, then cranked up the old Ford and drove off, backfires shaking the pigeons from their perches under the eaves.

  It was his way. The priest gathered food wherever he went. At Sunday Mass (crowded whenever a storm or a drought or a freeze threatened) he ended his sermon by reminding everyone that the rectory’s pantry was empty. When people came to confession, which they didn’t do very much, he always added food to the prayers of their penances. When Alcide Johnson cut on his girlfriend (so bad that the sheriff from Marysville came to investigate, only she wouldn’t say anything), he had to bring a full bucket of shrimp or crabs to the rectory every week. And when Theresa Petrie went to the old woman in Marshaltown for an abortion, then had a conscience and confessed to the priest, she had to bring half a dozen eggs every week for a year.

  One way or the other, food came to the priest’s kitchen: sausage and ham and quail and dove, fish and shellfish, preserves and cuite and cane syrup, tomatoes and corn and cabbage, turnips and collards and okra for gumbo.

  All sorts of food, Rita Landry remembered, drying the plaster crown of the Virgin in the front hall of the Sister Servants of Mary Home for Children. All kinds of food.

  The little old priest, so busy from early Mass until evening, took no notice of his household and his kitchen and so never knew that Mrs. Landry took most of his food, for appearance’ sake stuffing it under her clothes or hiding it in a basket of dirty laundry.

  She carried off all manner of things, once even a small sack of oysters. Rita remembered her father opening them at the kitchen table, slurping them from the shells so that their juice ran down his chin and seeped across the table and dripped to the floor, oyster liquid forming puddles in the worn spots of the linoleum. That was the night, her mother told her, the old man got his last child on her.

  So the busy priest stayed thin, and the Landry family managed to live. Mrs. Landry even managed to grow fat.

  “We are agreed then, Mrs. Landry,” the old priest said. “If your daughter has a vocation she mus
t follow it.” He switched on the radio again, and the hollow sound of a saxophone drifted across the room. He picked up his newspaper and settled himself more comfortably in his chair. And, yes, he said, he was feeling especially hungry. The eggs had been so very good yesterday. Would she fix them again tonight?

  “No eggs,” Mrs. Landry said.

  “There were six eggs yesterday, Mrs. Landry,” the priest said firmly, putting on his reading glasses. “I ate two. Which leaves four for supper tonight.”

  Rita held her breath. She and her mother had eaten the eggs that very morning, scrambled with olive oil and garlic—Rita could still taste the garlic on her breath.

  “You see the eggs, yes,” her mother said, “but you don’t see inside. No yolk, none, and the chicks ready to crack the shells. All feathers and eyes and no nourishment. I put them out for your cat.”

  The priest sighed, and picked up his paper.

  “The Bordelon boy brought you a quail, which is nice and fat, and some cabbage from his mother’s garden. It is a very small cabbage, nothing to look at, but it will make a good supper for one person.”

  Rita shivered with guilt. There were five fat quail—they were wrapped in newspaper in the kitchen right now. And the cabbage was very large.

  They would have quail and cabbage for supper, she thought, and her mother would complain if her teeth gritted on any bits of bird shot. The old man her father and her baby sister would have quail gravy on their cabbage and some of the meat cut up specially for them.

  Anyway the priest didn’t really need all that much food, Rita thought. And then she almost laughed out loud because quite suddenly she knew what her mother was thinking. Her mother was wondering if there wasn’t a way to give the priest only half a quail.

  “Very well then, quail”—the priest turned up the radio—“if that is what you have, Mrs. Landry. And how is the other child, that last one?”

  “She grows,” her mother said, and turned slowly, her body filling the narrow doorway.