Wading Home

by Rosalyn Story

  “By the way, you might as well know, I stopped by because Julian called me, asked me to check on you. He said you all had some words. Did he call back?”

  Simon’s skin prickles. Two weeks since their blowup over Parmenter and still their words stumbled broken and bruised into the growing gulf between them. And yesterday, when his son had called from New York, told him to stop acting like “a crazy old fool” (even offered him a plane ticket), a slow dirge of hurt still played in Simon’s head. He’d quietly hung up the phone in the middle of Julian’s rant. Sometimes, Simon swore, all that fame business had gotten to that boy’s head, made him forget who the daddy was in this deal.

  He, Simon, never would have treated his own daddy that way, lest the back of a hand land upside his head. Nor would his father have treated his father like that. The Fortier men were of the nononsense breed. Simon’s daddy had built this house with his two rock-hard hands seventy-eight years ago and would have thought nothing of using one of them to take down a too-grown son with a runaway mouth.

  World-famous trumpet player or not. Julian ought to show more respect.

  “No. Julian ain’t called.” Simon puts his hands in his pockets, and looks up at the ruffled sky. “Not since yesterday.”

  Sylvia starts the engine. “Well, you know the boy had a point.”

  Simon doesn’t know whether she’s talking about Julian’s anger at him for not leaving before the storm or for that business with Matthew Parmenter, the latest item on a list of painful issues that divided father and son like prickly thorns, and which was really none of Julian’s business anyway.

  Either way, he’s heard enough.

  “I got to check on my pot.” Simon says.

  “Did you get your blood pressure prescription filled?”

  Simon laughs. “Woman, leave me be! If I die, just carry me on up to Silver Creek! Dump me under that magnolia tree next to Ladeena.”

  “Right.” Sylvia rolls her eyes. “You and Silver Creek. Why don’t you just go on back there to live? Then you can be her problem for the rest of eternity.”

  She has often asked him that about Silver Creek. And he blows it off with a laugh, and changes the subject. He’s never fallen out of love with his boyhood home. But leave the city where he’s spent most of his life? Abandon the house built with his father’s own sweat and muscle, the place where he’s spent forty years with Ladeena, to return to the piece of land he grew up on? It’s complicated.

  “Been thinkin’ about it.” Simon strokes his chin, narrows his eyes into a sly squint. “But then who’d be here to meddle you?”

  She laughs a little, furrows her perfectly arched brows. “Stay well, Simon. Be careful.”

  He walks over to her car, leans in to her window to plant a kiss on her cheek. She places her hand softly on the back of his neck.

  “I worry about you, silly man.”

  He smiles through twinkling eyes. “Don’t. I’ma be fine.”

  She pulls away and waves and he lets out a little chuckle as the front wheel tips slightly over the curb. He watches the Toyota sputter away and reminds himself that when she returns, he needs to get her muffler fixed.

  “Take care, sweet lady,” he says after her, in a voice she couldn’t possibly hear.

  With the air closing in, the deep silver clouds hardened to a steely dome and the wind began to swirl with the oncoming rain. It’s beginning. Simon closed the window blinds in the kitchen and turned his thoughts to supper. He could tell by the aroma that the red beans were done. He filled his plate with rice, ladled the beans on top, and sat down at the glass table in the dining room. He pushed his chair back a little from the table and spread a napkin in his lap, and took a bite of the sausage. He was right. This was as good as anything Auntie Maree had ever made, rest her soul; the andouille sausages spiced and tender, the rice all flaky perfection, the garlic and fresh herbs blended flawlessly. Nothing took his mind off a storm like a plate of his own good cooking.

  When Ladeena was alive, they’d had a ritual on these nights of big storms. Filling the kitchen air with aromas—pots or pans of etouffee, gumbo, crawfish bisque—a sure-fire distraction from the hollering winds. Reading parts of the New Testament out loud, and later, as the Gulf churned, the river rose, and watery wind gusted through the eaves, huddling between the freshly ironed sheets holding each other so tight no woman-named storm could pry them apart. Making love as if it were their last night on earth, as well it could have been.

  It was during the storm nights that he most missed Ladeena. With her gone and Julian having left town years ago to, as Simon put it, “go off and get famous,” Simon’s life had changed. It didn’t seem so long ago that he’d been a busy family man with a wife, a young son, and a job as head chef at the place his best friend and employer, Matthew Parmenter, had billed the “Finest in French Quarter Dining.” Now, his starched, monogrammed uniforms and pleated white toques gathered dust in the closet where he’d stored them ages ago. Each long day resembled the one before, and while he could have been a lonely man, Simon figured he had a choice in the matter. He chose not to be.

  Each morning whenever the sun blazed through his kitchen blinds, after a breakfast of chicory coffee, eggs, and toast, he walked the neighborhood, up and down the street with his prized possession, the African cane of hand-carved ebony Julian had brought back from a concert tour in West Africa. Along the five-block circle to Field’s Grocery and around the school yard and the Mount Zion Baptist Church, neighbors leaned across porch banisters to wave, or slowed their cars to crawling to shout a greeting—How you feeling, Mr. For—tee—aay! and Simon nodded, gently touching the brim of his straw gardener’s hat, and shouted back, Woke up this mornin’, so I ain’t complainin’.”

  Friends chided him for daring to walk in a neighborhood that, though once safe, now had been all but taken over by young boys with a loathsome skulk in their walk and hooded, futureless eyes. Boys that had “the devil all up in them,” as the church folks said, with their drugs and guns. And that wasn’t the only way the neighborhood had changed; the tight-knit black community, so rich in history, had been broken in two by the wrecking ball. It had been almost forty years, but he still longed for the old days when the neighborhood was whole, before they’d built the awful freeway that sliced through his beloved Treme like a surgeon’s amputating knife. Before the shade of the majestic live oaks, perfect for parade watching, gave way to the shadows of a concrete overpass.

  Simon walked anyway, head high, defiant, never mind the freeway shadows and the glaze-eyed boys. He used the cane to steady his feet, but if need be, he could swing it like a cutlass. This was his neighborhood. He reclaimed it with each stubborn tap of his cane, and nobody—not street thugs nor the thieving city planners—was going to take it away.

  After his daily walk, Simon sat with a tray of lunch watching The Young and the Restless, then puttered in his garden, fussing over his bougainvillea, hibiscus, and herbs. As early as Tuesday he’d begin plans for the following Monday—red beans and dominoes night. Some Sundays after church, if the sun was shining and he had the urge for conversation, he would put on his red tie and brown straw hat and take the St. Claude bus along Rampart Street to Canal, and then board the streetcar that would take him to St. Charles Avenue.

  While the car rattled along past the old mansions and lavish lawns of juniper grass, he would sit near the window that held the best view of the live oaks and cypress trees, and watch the lean young bodies jog past Audubon Park. If he rode long enough, there would always be a tourist or two with an appetite for local flavor, and Simon would oblige with a must-do list that would rival the Chamber of Commerce’s glossiest brochure. What kind of music you like? Jazz? Zydeco? Rhythm and blues? You like barbecued shrimp? OK. Here’s where you go…

  If the tourists were a young romantic couple, he’d suggest a place where the lights were dim enough to hide an affectionate fondle—didn’t matter so much about the food. But if they were older, more particular
, he’d recite his A-list, varying it according to the tourists’ station and style. A well-heeled couple—a woman with facelift skin and a Louis Vuitton bag, her hand draped on the arm of a silver fox shod in Italian loafers—could handle Commander’s Palace or Galatoire’s and not blink at the bill. A pair of twentysomethings in faded jeans and backpacks…well, he’d send them over to Willie Mae’s or Dunbar’s for “some juicy fried chicken that would make you wanna slap your mama.”

  He would warn them, of course, that none of the places were as good as ol’ Parmenter’s, where he’d been head chef for more than forty years. I was famous for my red beans and rice, don’t cha know. Couldn’t nobody touch me. I tell you something, when that place closed, New Orleans cooking lost a step! And as Simon waxed on—about a neighborhood so old it had seen African slaves in Congo Square, dancing bamboula rhythms and stomping out the blueprint for jazz; about the Mardi Gras Indians with their wildly feathered and beaded “suits;” about the music, and of course, the famous food—the wide-eyed young or aging couple hung on the master chef’s every word. When they stepped off the streetcar into the sunlight and looked back at him with their phone cameras poised, he knew he’d given them what they wanted: a souvenir, an elbow-brush with authenticity. Long ago, he’d not only accepted his role as tourist memento, he’d come to relish it. He, Simon Fortier, was better than any postcard they could mail home to their friends. He offered up the soul of the city itself.

  When Simon got up from his table with his dishes, a cracking noise shook the house. Distant thunder, then a boom and crash like big steel spoons pounding metal sheets. “All right, now, just hold your horses,” he said, looking out the kitchen window at falling dark and rain, wonder sketched on his lean face.

  The main event was on. In minutes, the wind bellowed, rising now and then into a thin, shrill song like a distressed cat’s. Simon’s father had built the house well, but it would still be a long night. Simon stacked his dishes in the sink, opened the pantry door, and fumbled through a pile of old clothes, boots, checker sets, and domino boxes until he found the box as big as a hamper. He pulled it out and dragged it to the middle of the floor.

  The “hurricane box.” Ladeena had always been one to prepare for the worst. After her passing he’d still dragged it out year after year, out of loyalty, or reflex, and now he pulled the items out one by one: an oil lamp, a flashlight, a first-aid kit, a box of wooden matches and an unopened box of tapers, a hand-crank radio, and three bags of dried soups he’d picked up in an Army surplus store in Baton Rouge. He put the dried soups back in, but set the oil lamp and the radio (still bearing its price tag) on the floor next to the box. And from a deep corner, he pulled the Bible Jacob Fortier had given him on his sixteenth birthday, a week before he died.

  Simon ran his fingers along the brittle edges of the dry leather. He pulled out a chair from the dining table, sat, and opened the Bible. He turned to the first page, the name page, and at the end of the list of Fortier births, he traced his hand over his father’s wiggly script:

  Simon Fortier, born July 8, 1929.

  And then, his fingers traced the words written in his own hand:

  Julian Fortier, born Aug 13, 1969.

  Seeing his father’s hand always brought mist to his eyes, but tonight, it was the sight of Julian’s name that moved him. A frail and sickly newborn delivered with a tiny hole in his heart, the boy had been given a less-than-even chance for survival. On Julian’s birth night, during the surgery, Simon found himself sitting in the cold fluorescent glare of the fathers’ waiting room, head bowed between both hands, bargaining with God. When the child was finally given a good bill of health, Simon found a pay phone and called his closest relations, his Auntie Maree and cousin Genevieve at Silver Creek.

  “How is he?” Genevieve’s voice was cautious.

  Simon had to push the words out through a clog of tears. “Scrawny, no color. Doc says he’ll be OK, though. Prob’ly good as new.”

  “Lord Jesus,” Genevieve cried, and called to her mother.

  “I’ma send you some of my herbs for him,” Auntie Maree had told him in her usual too-loud telephone voice, her false teeth clicking. “Pack’em tight over his chest at night, and he’ll be fine. I done already seen it.” When he and Ladeena had brought him home from the hospital, he was so tiny and fragile he seemed breakable, caramel skin turned radish red, bawling a high-pitched wail from lungs that seemed anything but weak. In the sparsely furnished bedroom of the double shotgun, Simon sat on the bed and held his son in the crook of his arm, his face locked into an uncontrollable smile. He pressed his thumb against the baby’s palm and felt the tiny fist close around it.

  He looked at Ladeena, eyes glassy. “I’d throw myself in front of a train for this boy.”

  She smiled softly, a mischievous flicker in her eyes. “I know, darlin’. I’d throw you in front of a train for him, too.”

  He chuckled. That woman’s slicing humor had always caught him off guard. He closed the Bible, laid it down next to the box.

  Precious, that’s what he was, and might still have been so even if Ladeena’s frail womb could have accommodated another birth. They had tried not to spoil him, but to each of them the boy had been a reason to get up each morning, to work, to smile, to live. Cayenne pepper in honey-lemon tea, someone said, would keep colds away. So Simon plied the boy with hot drinks throughout the damp New Orleans winters. Trumpet lessons, somebody else said, might strengthen his lungs, so Simon pawned his wedding ring and bought a silver-plated Conn. And from Julian’s first blast of cracking, pitchless air, there would be no turning back. He became a trumpet player first, everything else second.

  When Ladeena died and it was just the two of them, Simon and eighteen-year-old Julian found shelter from their grief in a brotherly bond, and stayed close even after Julian left for New York. But an accident, one slick, rainy night a year ago on Julian’s thirtysixth birthday, had done more than throw his brilliant career into a quandary—it had pushed father and son apart. Julian grew cool and testy, found acrimony in everything, humor in nothing. Simon reminded him to be patient; hadn’t the doctor said the surgery went well? With time, he’d be playing the trumpet better than ever. But Julian scoffed—a condescending silence that insinuated Simon didn’t know what he was talking about, and bruised his father’s tender ego. Afterwards, Julian’s fragile jaw tightened at the mere mention of his career, the trumpet, or the night when his future had changed.

  If it had been only that, maybe things between them would have improved. But the argument over Simon’s employer and best friend had further shaken their bond. The horrible business deal with his best friend and boss, Parmenter, had been a mistake, maybe; Simon had never been that good with money. But it was old news. Yet when Julian found out about it recently, he acted as if it had happened yesterday. Money, Simon argued, was not worth breaking up a friendship, but he wondered if the matter would stand between him and his son forever.

  And then, there was the matter of Silver Creek.

  He grabbed his rib as a small pain shot up his back. He’d forgotten to take that arthritis medicine. Seemed it always happened when he thought about Julian and Silver Creek, and the storm didn’t help. Since the end of slavery, the land in Pointe Louree Parish, with its wild, arboreal splendor, fertile earth and teeming creek, had been his family’s blessing—everything that could grow there did so in abundance and untamed beauty. Ever since Simon’s great-grandfather, the Frenchman, had bequeathed it to his black son Moses, it had been passed down from son to son with care, like a genetic trait passing through blood.

  It was Simon’s biggest failing, he believed, that while his son had inherited his thick hair, long-lashed eyes, and taste for music and well-seasoned food, he hadn’t gotten the love for family land. It was nowhere to be found in Julian’s trove of things that mattered, and it broke Simon’s heart.

  Money, that’s what his son cared about. Cash. Coin. Like every other young man Simon knew. Nowadays it
was hard to fill a young man’s head with his own history when his heart gave it no play.

  Somewhere in the commotion of water thrashing the house and the locomotive howl of wind, the phone rang. Simon’s heart raced—the phone still worked? About time that boy called to apologize. He shifted his mood to one of forgiveness; Julian was calling, that was all that mattered.

  “Hello?”

  “Simon, you still there?”

  His cousin Genevieve’s voice broke up in the weak connection from Silver Creek. He tried not to let his disappointment show.

  “Genevieve.”

  “Simon, Lord, I got to talk to you—”

  Though he could barely hear her, it wasn’t hard to make out the panic in her voice.

  “I know, I know,” he said. “I’m still here. But I’ma be all right. I’ll be calling you when this storm blows over.”

  But she wasn’t talking about the storm. With the rain pummeling his house and the line growing more staticky, he could hear every other word. Something about the Parettes in Pointe Louree, he thought he heard, the family whose property bordered their land to the east.

  Genevieve had told him weeks ago about the rumors: the developers sniffing around in their massive SUVs, shaded gazes lingering over the best properties in Pointe Louree, stroking their chins at green fields and imagining condos and parking lots. The Parette property had been in their family as long as Silver Creek had been in Fortier hands—longer. The Parettes would no sooner sell their land than the Fortiers, and the Fortiers would never sell.

  “They found his car, he must of got run off the road…”

  Genevieve’s speech wasn’t the best since she’d lost most of her bottom teeth. But he thought he heard something about an accident. An accident with their neighbor, Nicholas Parette.

  “Veevy?” Simon shouted into the phone. “What did you say?”

  More static. “Dead. He’s dead.”

  Simon felt heat in his chest. “What?”