by Fred DeVecca
“Yes I did. I wrote that damn verse. A long time ago.”
“I thought that was a traditional song.”
“It is. We add verses to traditional songs all the time. You know that. You’ve done it yourself.”
“Okay. So if it doesn’t mean death, what does it mean?”
“I’m not sure. Not death.”
She thrust the postcard into my face. “That’s Julie’s handwriting, Frankie.”
“I know.”
Sarah’s expression was quizzical. And concerned. There was some joy too … and hope. I’m sure my face looked the same. Mooney and Gloria still stood frozen in a tableau of confusion.
“When did you write that, Frankie?
“So long ago I can’t remember when.”
“And where?”
“A place that doesn’t exist—Lavender Street.”
Chapter Fifty-Four
A Guy Looking for a Guitar
It was hot in New Orleans. Hot as hell.
I didn’t tell Karen I was leaving. She might have tried to stop me. I wasn’t supposed to leave town, but it wasn’t anything the airports had checks on, so I went.
I didn’t tell anybody. I was hoping for a short trip.
Clara went sightseeing. Sarah and I were there to work.
Connections led us to Ben. My cousin Tommy knew New Orleans like I knew Shelburne Falls. Tommy knew that anybody looking for a guitar in this town eventually found his way to Ben.
I wasn’t looking for a guitar. I was looking for a missing girl. And for a guy who might know something about the missing girl. A guy who was looking for a guitar.
There was no air conditioning in Ben’s shack. There was one rather ineffective fan trying to push dripping air from one room to the other, but I think it would have felt the same way in there if it was turned off. There were only two rooms anyway, so there was not much space to push anything into.
It smelled like wet dog, and the wet dog in question sat there panting on the porch, lying on his side as if dead. The dog was wet because he had just taken a dip in the river to cool off, a fruitless act if ever there was one.
That’s where Ben had his workbench set up, on the open porch. There were guitar bodies hanging up all around him in various states of repair and disrepair, and mandolins and banjos and basses too.
He was lean and wiry and his hair was still quite dark for a guy in his seventies. His accent, for a Cajun, sounded strangely like a New Yorker’s, dropping the ‘R,’s and clipped and nasal. He handed Tommy what he called a “mando.”
It looked immaculate and new and shiny, but it was ancient. “Lady on Toulouse found this in her attic. Peeled off the back. Warped. Redid it. Polished it up nice.”
Tommy plucked it. It rang sharp and clean. He set it down. Sarah picked it up and played the opening riff from “Losing My Religion.”
She smiled at me. “Your theme song, Francis.”
“Didn’t know you played,” I said, amazed.
“You don’t know much about me, Frankie. I’m in a band at school. Actually, I’m in like three bands. We’ve got seventeen different ones there, and I’m in three of them.”
She set it back down and Ben handed the mando to Tommy.
“Don’t know if that’ll cover it,” he said.
Tommy didn’t say anything. He nodded. Guy owed him a favor, apparently.
Tommy set the mando down and Ben led us down the rotting steps from the porch to the worn path leading to the river. It was strewn with old tires and debris and tree limbs.
I looked back over my shoulder. The ancient shack was built on stilts and high up on the levee with another dozen similar homes. They might have been in the deepest bayou instead of here in an industrial neighborhood right in the city.
The wet dog followed us, limping. He could barely walk, whether from the heat or arthritis or an injury I could not tell.
We came upon a crude, eight-foot chicken-wire fence. Ben opened up something resembling a gate held closed by a black bungee cord. We walked the few feet down to the river, and we all sat on a log except the wet dog, who found a cool mud puddle to sink down into.
“Didn’t get a drop in Katrina,” he said. “Around the corner at the lake was the worst place, but here … nothing. Best place to live in town. They’re raising the levee two feet. No reason to do that. Now they’re cutting down my trees. Wouldn’t be surprised if they take my house and try to buy me off for five bucks. My lawyer’s on it.”
This guy looked like he couldn’t afford a newspaper, let alone a lawyer. Maybe he had a million bucks stashed under the floorboards.
We sat there, watching the river flow.
“The dude you’re looking for, he’s coming by this afternoon, he says. Enormous white dude. Big as this goddamn house. It’s an old Gibson Hummingbird I fixed up. Perfect sound. An icon—rare, mahogany, square shoulder dreadnought. Not many around. Crazy white kid’s paying me $6,000 for it and I didn’t have to do much to it at all.”
Yep, that sounded like the guy I was looking for. A guy looking for a guitar, a poor guy who had—apparently, somehow—come into some money.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Waiting for this Big White Dude
We hung around a long time waiting for this big white dude. Tommy and Ben started drinking home-made amber-colored hooch. A woman started to approach Sarah with some too, in a coffee cup. She looked at me and I frowned, so she walked away without delivering the cup. Quiet, small, and mousy, the woman blended in with the woodwork. I couldn’t tell if she was Ben’s wife, or daughter, or mother, or what. She was nearly invisible and of indeterminate age. This was clearly Ben’s space, but I had the feeling she was more of a vital presence here when Ben did not have guests.
Tommy and Ben talked musician talk. Sarah picked pieces of tunes on the mando. She was good. I looked around. All the furnishings were dark, damp wood, dating back to the fifties, and considering the amount of wear, they’d been sitting in this room since then.
Frack was, if anything, bigger than the last time I had seen him.
He strolled right into Ben’s shack—there were no real doors to knock on—and walked out onto the porch where we were all seated.
He was surprised to see me and Sarah.
“Mister Raven?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Call me Frank. And you remember Sarah.”
“Well, yeah. What the hell are you guys doing here?”
“Looking for you.”
“How the hell did you find me?”
“That’s what I do. I find things.”
He laughed at this. “I think you just found more than you bargained for.”
“More than I bargained for is exactly what I wanted to find.”
The mysterious, silent woman came in and gave Frack a cloudy glass containing that same mysterious amber liquid the others were drinking. He sipped at it.
“She knew you would find us. She wanted you to. I just didn’t expect it would be here.”
“Funny how that works sometimes,” I replied. “Sometimes you find things where you least expect it. That’s what ‘find’ means.”
Ben handed Frack the guitar. Frack clumsily made some simple chords and strummed it.
“It sounds sweet,” he said. “Awesome.”
“I polished it up nice,” Ben said.
Frack reached into his pocket and came up with a big wad of hundred dollar bills. He peeled off sixty bills and handed them to Ben, who accepted them without counting and stuffed them into the hole of some junker wreck of a guitar. Maybe that’s where all this guy’s money was stashed.
Sarah picked something on the mando. Frack strummed along as well as he could. Tommy picked up a big stand-up bass from the corner. Ben was on a banjo. They sounded good, like a real band, with Frack being something of a weak link. They played for half an hour without stopping, but they changed tunes a few times.
Everyone smiled when they were done. Music makes people happy.
&nb
sp; Frack got up to leave.
“Meet me tonight,” he said.
“Where? When?” I asked.
“I’m playing tonight with Slim Stevie Slates at TJ’s on Frenchmen,” reported Tommy. “Anyone can tell you where it is. As good a place as any to meet up.”
“That’ll work,” said Frack. “Ten o’clock?”
Then, as he took his new guitar and walked out of Ben’s shack, he turned and said, “You’ll see her tonight. She’s been waiting for this.”
Chapter Fifty-Six
The Sign of the Cross
Nobody had to tell us where TJ’s on Frenchmen was. Tommy drove us there with me stuffed in the back with his gigantic stand-up bass guitar and Sarah squeezed together in the front passenger seat. They started playing at eight; we were supposed to meet Frack at ten. This was going to be a late night. We arrived at seven with Tommy to help him set up. I heard a strange chirping as we unloaded the car in the hot humid street in front of the bar. Turned out it was not a bird.
“Tree frogs,” explained Tommy. “It’s so damp out they’re chirping like they do in the rain. Call them rain frogs then.”
They were not birds, but I recorded them anyway. The sound was similar enough, and I thought that they could console me late some long sleepless night, just as my birds had been doing.
We watched Tommy and Stevie play for a while. At their break, they sipped beers and talked of various forms of water life.
“You shine a flashlight at them when it’s dark,” reported Stevie. “You see their beady little shrimp eyes and grab the suckers with a skimmer net.”
“They stay right on the surface,” added Tommy.
They continued sipping beers and talking.
At ten, Frack walked in. He was on time, and took us for a slow, hot walk through downtown streets, then residential streets. A streetcar ride was followed by more residential streets. We ate po’ boys. They drank hurricanes. We watched an old man toss a ball to a dog.
And then, there it was.
“This is the place,” said Frack.
The place took up an entire city block. It was surrounded by pretty, cozy-looking homes in pastel colors, some in multi-colors. Everything was green with palms and grass, all visible through the dark from the streetlights and the home lights and the starlight and the moonlight.
It was all bricked in—an eight-foot-high concrete and red brick wall all around the perimeter. On top of the wall was a three-foot black-iron railing. Except for the fact that it was considerably higher, it reminded me very much of the wall and black railing where Julie had first disappeared into the river on the day of the fateful movie shoot. Our girl seemed to have a habit of falling off high railings and into whatever lies beneath.
We walked all around the big rectangle. You could not see inside. Even in places where there once were gates, there were now bricks or wooden walls. Whatever was inside that courtyard was hidden from our view.
Then, on one side, there was a break in the wall and a real functioning gate. And a sign. The sign said we were welcome so I supposed we were, but I felt the ghosts of when I was not welcome here and hesitated.
I suppose I had been hesitating all during this entire Nutting Girl quest and adventure. Hesitating way too much. I had been chicken.
I sucked it up. “Let’s go,” I said.
Sarah made the sign of the cross, which surprised me. I think she had little, if any, formal Catholic training. But then I didn’t know she could play “Losing My Religion” on the mando either.
I also made the sign of the cross—half out of respect and half to ward off danger.
We entered the gate of the monastery.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
It Looks Like You’ve Found Her
It was cool inside, and I don’t think they even had air conditioning on. It was bare, cold stone and brick and rocks and concrete and tiles, and it was dark. It smelled of incense and disinfectant.
No one greeted us at first. The door was unlocked and we just walked in. There was a tiny entryway with a few explanatory signs we didn’t bother to read, and two confessional-like grated windows—one on either side of the alcove. Both were closed tight.
There was a buzzer at one of these windows. After several minutes of just standing there, absorbing it all, Frack pushed it. We heard it buzz somewhere in the back.
We waited. No one showed up.
Frack did not push the buzzer again. No one did. We simply stood there and waited.
Then she showed up, floating in as if she had no feet. She was clad in a long, gray, simple gown that touched the floor, with a white and gray veil covering most of her face. She had an unusually pretty face, pale, some brown wisps of hair falling out of the veil, serene brown eyes, mouth flat without a smile but still somehow pleasant.
No, it wasn’t “her”—it wasn’t Julie. It was Sister Ofelia.
Her voice was soft. “Hello. Welcome, Mister Frack. It’s nice to see you again. We don’t usually entertain visitors this late at night. We’re not exactly late-night folks here. But there is something very special about these late, hot nights, isn’t there? And believe it or not, we can occasionally do something outside of the proverbial box here too. If this is what works for the schedules of sincere visitors, we can accommodate that.”
“These are the friends I told you about,” he said.
We both shook Sister Ofelia’s tiny soft hand, which was nonetheless strong.
Sarah introduced herself and I said, “I’m Francis.”
“Francis,” she repeated. “How appropriate. We’re Franciscans here.”
“I know,” I said. “The second order.”
“You know something about us?”
“Something,” I answered, “but only something.”
“Well, come on in,” she said.
She opened one of the doors and took us into a sitting room with a couch and three thinly stuffed chairs. We all sat down. Sister Ofelia looked out of time except for her Nike basketball shoes—white with red and orange stripes. When she sat down, you could see her feet.
Frack and Sarah sat on the couch. We were offered tea, which we politely refused. I wasn’t here for tea. I was here for only one thing—Juliana Velvet Norcross, The Nutting Girl.
Sarah, bless her, took charge in her most gracious, curious-guest guise, smiling sweetly and seemingly completely enthralled with the good sister’s tales.
“This is such a big space,” Sarah said. “It’s so cool. How many of you are here, anyway?”
“Only eight,” replied Sister Ofelia. “Well, nine now.”
“Wow! So much space for nine people. You have plenty of room to get lost in,” Sarah said.
Sister Ofelia laughed. “Yes. I always dreamed of living in a place I could get lost in. And I found it. But one needs space to breathe and move around in for a healthy life, doesn’t one?”
The good sister continued, “There used to be many more of us. Back when the monastery was in the Ninth Ward. We had upwards of thirty or forty then, but that was a while ago.”
“Not that many people choose this kind of life now, I guess,” Sarah said. “This can’t be an easy life for anyone. It’s such a commitment. I can’t imagine how I would do here.”
Sister Ofelia laughed. “You might be surprised, dear. If you’re called here, you’re called here. But that’s been the case as long as I’ve been alive, and before that too. There are always fewer and fewer, and people keep foretelling our demise. Yet somehow, from somewhere, someone shows up. A very slow trickle, but they show up. Many of them stay. Our death has been greatly exaggerated. We will be here forever. At least I hope so. And pray so. And I believe so, God willing.”
She let the silence spin out for a moment before adding, “And that’s how your friend got here—Sister Sabina. She just showed up one morning, knocking on our door.”
“That’s pretty wild, isn’t it?” asked Sarah.
“You’d be surprised. It’s not unheard of
. We welcome it. How one comes to us in this community is a gift from God. We talk to them first, of course. Find out why they are here, what has drawn them. Is it real? Do they have the calling? Then they go away and think it over. If they come back, they’re welcome to stay for a two-week trial period. If they stay beyond that, they stay.”
“It’s anonymous here, right?” asked Sarah. “It must be.”
“Oh, yes. They change their names and relinquish their possessions. We understand about families and people from your life who you love. No one has to give that up, but for all practical purposes, they do. This is a new life devoted to God, and all else becomes less important. We’ve had women here who were married. One woman has four children. We have all kinds here.”
“And now you have a movie star,” said Sarah.
“Do we?” asked the good sister innocently.
“You mean you don’t know?”
“Sister Sabina? She was in a movie?”
“You don’t know who she is?”
Sister Ofelia might have been playing dumb. Whatever she was thinking, she kept her expression neutral. “We know she’s Sister Sabina and we know she was called here. That’s all we need or want to know.”
“Don’t you read the papers? Watch the news?”
Sister Ofelia laughed again. “Well, we’re not totally cloistered. We’re allowed to watch television for one hour a day, but frankly no one does. We have one very old TV and I’m not even sure it still works. We don’t get newspapers or magazines. Sister Breaca is the only one who goes out. She goes to the grocery, the drugstore, and runs errands for us. No one else leaves. She’s the only one who uses the internet too. We need one another here. We mostly stay here and pray. That’s why we’re here.”
Sarah recited the names: “Ofelia, Breaca, Sabina. Do all the nuns’ names end in ‘A’?”
“Well, actually, yes they do. It’s not a requirement. It’s just our little tradition. Everybody must have the name of a saint. That’s required by the Church. And here everyone chooses an ‘A’ name. Started a long time ago when the men were here. It’s all tied to a blind monk’s regaining his sight. It was his preference and we just adopted it. ‘A’ for the women. ‘O’ when there were men here. I’ll tell you that story if you want.”