Celeste stopped rubbing her forehead. She didn’t think she wanted to know much more, except one thing. “What’s he look like?”
“Tall and dark with a black hat. Wears glasses with only one dark lens so he can see into the world of the living and the dead both.”
The mother offered a helping up hand to Celeste while laying a stilling one on her daughter’s shoulder. “Don’t you worry about Mr. Nebo, Celeste. Too little knowledge can be a disturbing thing, Aurore. Remember that.”
From where they left the streetcar, Celeste led them to Odette’s house, where Josephine stood, hands on hips watching them approach. Sensing trouble, Celeste thanked Miss Yvette and Aurore and ran ahead to face Josephine alone and gauge the weight of her trouble.
But her circle of acquaintances in New Orleans was now greater by two.
Quilt
Chores at Aunt Odette’s were so different from those back home. The garden in the courtyard was just for looking at and for growing a little shade in summer at midday. Josephine lorded over the kitchen and kept the house in order. Celeste had her own room now, and was expected to keep it looking like no one lived there. And there was the low lying dust that came from nowhere to grey the white painted trim work lining the bottom of walls or the shapely pickets that held up the railing beside the stairs. Dust settled there too, and it was Celeste’s job to keep it from getting too comfortable. A lesson in patients and care is what Odette called that chore, and Celeste got tired of hearing it.
But those few chores didn’t amount to much of any particular day. Most of the waking hours were spent in the school of Odette. Numbers, science, art, and reading from that wall full of books that watched Celeste as she toiled at the leather topped desk. She sat for hours, balancing on a stack of buttoned pillows for added height and not allowed to slump over her work. “You’ll have better focus and poise that way,” Odette explained when Celeste suggested that just one elbow on the desktop would help.
Some days, between lessons, Celeste would be offered the open door and a chance to roam the streets, but when it wasn’t offered, Celeste knew she always had the gap under the side gate and took her chances there, careful not to be seen by Josephine. But on two occasions, she sensed something in the air; attention focused her way, not unlike those times when she’d feel a prickling on her neck and turn to see someone looking at her. The first time this happened, Celeste asked Odette if her father was coming home.
“Trying to, but it’s a long road,” Odette said.
“I think someone’s coming to see me,” Celeste told her.
Odette just laughed. “This city will fool you into thinking that sometimes. But you can go sit on the gallery outside your window and keep watch till dinner.”
Celeste did, and for an hour folks came and went along the street without stopping or even looking up where she sat peering through the railings. Only when she caught a whiff of cooking coming through the window from her room, sent up by Josephine to let her know it was almost time to come sit at the big table—only then did Celeste see her visitor coming down the street on mule back. She ducked through the window and stampeded down the long stairs, screaming out to every living soul and any passing ghost for that matter, that John Stone was coming. She danced before the locked door until Odette arrived from the Parlor.
Her father’s old friend stood outside with hat in one hand and a brown paper package, bound in string under his arm.
He’d come a long way and smelled of time spent on a working mule. Odette sent Josephine home and John Stone up to get the road off him, and held Celeste at bay while the three of them ate. Only then did she usher them all into the Parlor where the brown paper wrapped parcel lay on a table. Celeste plucked anxiously at the strings holding it closed.
“It’s for you to open,” John Stone said.
Something in the way he said it kept her from ripping into it like she would a Christmas present. Once she’d mastered the loose knot, the strings fell away and the wrapping almost bloomed A scent wrapped her face that took her back to better times. Odette stepped up to help her unfold the quilt.
“We found it,” John Stone said. “It was in a box, unharmed by the storm. Sandrine cleaned it, and we’ve held it safe until I could find a time to bring it here.”
“Your mother made this for you, Celeste,” Odette explained. “I’d forgotten how she worked on it over the years since you were born. Square by square.” The quilt lay open now and was complete. “She managed to finish it.”
Wrapped inside the quilt was a small wooden box, a few hand spans long. “That’s Mama’s sewing box,” Celeste explained. “Papa made it for her.”
“It’s handed down to you now,” Odette told her.
They brought the mule into the courtyard for the night and John Stone preferred bedding down on the rug in the Library rather than sleep in a room upstairs. Not that he was afraid of the long stairs, as Celeste thought he might be, since he climbed them without complaint so Celeste could show him the gallery, her high porch, and the longer views it offered up. But he stayed well back from the railing.
“Sandrine has been worried about you,” he said, looking at the sky above the roof across the street rather than the street itself. “I can say you are safe and well.”
Celeste could tell that he was looking at the stars. She pointed to those hanging low. “See those?” She traced a shape in the dark air. “That’s the Big Dipper. Papa taught me that, only Mama called them the Great Bear.”
“The Great Bear,” he repeated. “My grandfather called it that. So many shapes in the stars, but now, I only know that one. So much I was taught that I’ve forgotten.”
“I still see the bear,” she offered, then tapped her head. “When I dream, I sometimes see the bear. The one I told you about. The one with my Mama’s eyes.”
“Even here?”
She nodded, but it was dark out and he was still looking at the stars, so she added. “Most nights, and sometimes when my mind wanders off to where she is. But I don’t tell Aunt Odette. She might not like that.”
“Maybe not. But thank you for telling me.”
He left early the next morning. Lead his rested mule out from the courtyard and set off for home. It would be many years before Celeste would see him again.
For a few weeks more, Celeste slept under the quilt with one window open, even as the nights grew colder toward year’s end, thinking that, somehow, her spirit guide might need the open flowing air to find her. And the bear did find her as often as Celeste looked, as she waited for her father to come home—to the new home.
“He is on a boat and that’s all we can know for now,” Odette told her, day after day as Christmas approached.
It was the earliest part of Christmas Eve when the bear with her mother’s eyes sniffed the air of that bright land where she and Celeste walked, and told Celeste she should listen to the air as well. See if there was something in it she should be mindful of. Celeste did and sensed it was time to leave the bear for a time and wake.
She slipped out from under her mother’s quilt and to the open window where the same air from the bright land called her to come outside. From the high porch, she squinted into the dim light at the figure marching toward her. She squealed out something to wake Odette but did not stop, flying down the stairs and out the back door. Out through the courtyard and under the iron gate to the street where she found her father standing on the sidewalk looking at the front door. When she reached him, his gunny sack dropped behind him and he went to his knees and seemed to sag his whole weight unto her shoulders, and she took that load like a colossus holds up the sky.
Part II – The Spirit Box
Message
The woman in the grey dress wasn’t from the neighborhood, probably from the Quarter or Uptown since she looked around like a nervous bird, head snapping this way and that. She stopped in front of the shop on the corner and sized it up against the other buildings on the street before going inside. At that time of morning th
e bakery was always busy since anyone with sense knew to get there early when the bread was fresh. The grey dressed woman stood back from the counter, sizing up the women behind it, much as she’d sized up the face of the shop. One woman in particular drew most of her attention, but that woman was occupied with directing a girl at the counter. She watched this substantial woman with the substantial voice that was perfectly pitched for cutting through anything at all. But she was busy, so the grey dressed woman waited.
A side door opened and another woman slipped through the action behind the counter—slipped through like a pickpocket through a crowd or like a ghost through a flock of mourners. This little un-noticeable woman passed all the way through to the far end of the counter where it was quiet, and continued to mull over the sheet of paper in her hand.
The grey dressed woman approached her, all the while keeping an eye on the more substantial woman who was now joking with a customer.
“Excuse me. I was told to come place a special bread order for an event Mrs. Broussard is having on Saturday. I was told I should speak to Miss Dubois the owner, but she looks to be busy. Do you think you could ask her to come have a word?”
The little woman behind the counter looked across the room to the substantial woman—twice her own size, surely; gave her a good looking over as if she’d never really sized her up before. What she saw must have perplexed her somehow. She turned to the grey dressed woman, waiting to catch her eye before replying.
“I’m Celeste Dubois. How can I help you?”
By mid afternoon the bakery was closed and most of the staff was off for home but Celeste sat in the little office, little more than a pantry with a desk wedged against one wall between shelves. Annie stood in the open doorway and frowned at her boss.
Celeste recognized that look and knew it was just how Annie waited for someone to get something off their chest. Always ready to deal with whatever. Task oriented.
“Why is it that strangers find it hard to believe that I am who I am?” Celeste asked
“The owner you mean. The boss.”
Celeste nodded. “Never fails. Both of us out there, and they’ll think it’s you.”
“I look the part,” Annie said. “Sound it too.” She frowned a bit more, then added, “And happy birthday. You forgot again. Thirty, and that’s supposed to be a big one. Will be for me, when that day comes. What are you planning to do? Nothing special?”
“Guess that’s so, since I forgot.”
“Want me to come around later and drag you off somewhere lively? Maybe find you a birthday present? Someone nice?”
Celeste almost laughed. “Maybe another time. Papa always remembers, even if I don’t.”
“Haven’t seen him in the shop lately. He doing alright?”
“Been tired,” Celeste said. “Thinks there’ll be another war over in Europe.”
“He’s already served once and they don’t take men his age. Don’t take women either. Is it about your brother? He worried he may want to fight again?”
“Maybe so.”
“Never any word?”
“No.” Celeste’s thoughts wandered and it seemed to show.
“Well don’t hang around here too long. Go see what your Papa has planned.”
She let Annie finish up and head for home but she lingered a while longer herself. Wouldn’t take her long to get home where her father waited—staying home today at Celeste’s suggestion. From the bakery in The Bywater to her house in the Lower Ninth was an easy bicycle ride and one she could cover in ten minutes, give or take. The fastest run was well before sunrise, crossing the Industrial Canal and down St. Claude to Piety. No traffic and only the occasional stray cat to worry about. On the afternoon ride home she might zigzag a different route, driven by whim—one of her few deviations from strict routine. And if the St. Claude Bridge showed its usual preference for passing ships over skinny women on bicycles, well, she’d just lean her bike and herself against the railing and wait for the ship to pass the lock, passing to or from the river.
The bridge was an old friend by now, like those at the gates of water ringed castles, only out of iron like her father had worked when a much younger man, but iron on a grand and glorious scale. She called it the Colossus. Standing there alone, watching her comings and goings without judgment. Mostly quiet. Like her father.
He’d come home from the war to all he had lost, but pushed on with life, saying he was bound to carry on with the dream he’d had for his family, even though Marie was gone. He owed that much to her and more. And he’d had enough of iron. Odette stood by him in his plans since she was connected and drove with an unbending will. They schemed together a lot in those early months after he got home. Mostly, they schemed about bread.
As the story went, Bernard had met a grateful baker in France who wrote down the secret to his perfect bread and gave it to Bernard on a day when the unit was trucked away to another town. He showed that paper to Odette and Celeste, saying how he intended to be a baker.
Celeste had liked the sound of that and so had Odette. But if Odette liked a notion, she didn’t just like it. She put her mind to how it could work out, and she pushed in that direction like the Mississippi pushes mud. Her pencils worked the numbers and Bernard’s strong hands prepared loaves of bread to sample every Sunday and sometimes other days as well, until they had it right—like his memory of the bread the Frenchman had given him as proof of the recipe’s worth.
On Sundays, he would go on long walks with Celeste, exploring the city and keeping an eye out for where his bakery might fit in. He found it on a day when he and Celeste explored The Bywater, stopping at the monument being built in honor of men who’d served in the war from the Ninth Ward. There would be bronze plaques, filled with names when it was all done, and then, Bernard would show Celeste where his name might have been, had he been living in their new house instead of the old one where Marie had died. He’d say that, and each time walk on in silence for a few blocks. Celeste could feel the regret pouring off him, every time as strong as the time before. No mercy. No forgiveness, no matter what anyone said.
By Celeste’s thirteenth birthday they moved out of Odette’s house and into one of their own beyond the canal, following the trail blazed by St. Claude Avenue’s new streetcar line, into a neighborhood once connected to the city by streets, but now by bridges. Odette didn’t care for that move, but Bernard meant to build a new home. He could manage it across the canal and was used to a walk in to work.
A bigger house than the old one, but still small compared to Odette’s. Just one level. Just one porch and a stoop outside the back door. It also helped having an oak tree in the side yard of the new house; not the back yard but the skinny one between their house and the house on their morning side. Not a great Live Oak either, but an oak just the same and she was glad to have it.
Once the bakery on Piety Street opened, Celeste joined her father on the early walks in to work until she took a fancy to the sight of folks on bicycles and convinced Bernard they should modernize their means of transport. On and on, day after day. Life sped up and moved forward.
She was thirty now.
There was movement by the door. Probably Annie back to reminder her of something, only the voice that spoke wasn’t Annie’s—not strong and full like chicory coffee with something sweet dropped in, but cold and dry like a gritty doorstep in January.
“Life passed you by, has it?” the ghost said. “Well, that can happen when you’re too scrawny to turn a beau’s head, and you spend all of your time working this place, piling up money I guess. Selling bread,” she passed a dry puff through her pale nostrils. “I suppose it beats selling yourself—not that you’d find any takers.” The ghost raised a pale hand. “The truth is not always easy to swallow, but it’s always for the best.”
Celeste slammed the ledger book closed, and the sound of it was enough to send the ghost away; off to the corner to wait for another time to have a little word or two. That’s how it work
ed, and most times, Celeste could almost feel the visitation coming on. Maybe like her mother’s Sadness, only different, since the ghost didn’t linger for much more time than was needed to get in a harsh lesson when Celeste felt down or troubled. Very efficient and ever the surprise unwelcome guest.
She went home by Burgundy, passing the monument her father liked to touch where his own name might have been had things been different. She slowed but did not stop, nor did the Colossus stop her on that afternoon. She passed beneath it and thought how she’d slipped under Odette’s side gate all those years back—only a tiny girl, off to see whatever she might, good or wicked. Just out to wander. Passing under the Colossus, she thought of how her wanderings had lost the thrill of those early days in the city. She laughed out loud, thinking of how innocent and foolish she’d been; a child from the country, taking a morning stroll with a prostitute or escaping an angry drunk by ducking into a cemetery. Might have died any number of times before her Papa could get home. Would have made that homecoming all the sadder for him.
Their house on Marais was much like any other on that street, at least to the casual observer, but to anyone local it had Bernard’s mark on it, plain as day. A sturdy house, built by a man who knew how things should be made to hold strong, and with just that eye to proper proportion. He’d been to Paris. Everybody knew that.
She dropped her bike onto the front porch and went in to find her father sitting at the table, looking at papers in a house filled with the smell of baked something. Celeste sniffed and could judge pretty close to what it was—not a cake since Bernard didn’t care for cakes of the usual sort. Something flakey. Almonds and honey. He greeted her with a smile as she came in. That worn smile of his. Almost worn out and only in his sixties.
“Made you something for your birthday,” he said. “We can have some before dinner if you like. In case you wanted to hit the town in celebration. Thirty years. Like a grown up now. Maybe you could go out and kick up your heels. Not right you should be stuck in this house with an old Papa.”
Child of the Storm Page 9