Wading Home

by Rosalyn Story

  The fullness began deep inside him, climbed up from his heart to thicken his throat and then the back of his tongue before it climbed higher to spill over, a pool of joy, from his eyes. He was almost home.

  Sitting in the back seat of the couple’s car, he grabbed the cuff of his sleeve into his fist and rubbed the water from his eyes the way he had done as a boy on the day his father, Jacob, died. It may have been the knowledge that the New Orleans house his father had built was ruined that brought on the flood of emotion. Well, that house may be gone but Silver Creek, his father’s true love, was right here before his misting eyes. The sixty years that had passed since he was a boy here, swimming in the creek, plowing the land, cooking in Auntie Maree’s kitchen, had done nothing to whittle down his child-wonder at its magic beauty. As they rambled down the packed-dirt road, a shallow breeze stirred the pine needles into a perfume he knew so well; the branches of willows bowed to greet him and the egrets lifted their wings in salute. Sunlight danced on the wave-tips of the creek water as they passed, and the woman in the front seat brushed black hair from her eyes as she turned around to speak.

  “This is quite beautiful. Are we near?”

  Simon suppressed the giddy joy in his voice. “Be just another mile or so.”

  When they reached the ruins of the old stone church in the open meadow and the old cemetery that held his wife’s remains, and where Jacob, Moses and all the others slept, Simon placed two fingers on his lips, floated a kiss on the breeze.

  The road narrowed to a path shaded by majestic pines and the tunneling arms of cypress trees. When they passed the barn, he pointed ahead. “There, right there.”

  It had taken a while to figure out that the couple would not take him, without a doctor’s release, to his home. When they had finally agreed to at least talk to Dr. Singh, Simon’s young Indian physician, Simon listened with his heart in his throat. The young doctor insisted, in an accent similar to the young woman’s in the front seat: You’re still a little weak, you were out of it a long time. I’m going to prescribe another transfusion—

  Simon had said, a little too loudly. I told you, I feel fine. I’ll feel better if I can just get out of here, get back to my own cooking.

  He regretted saying that. Insulting the hospital’s kitchen did nothing to help his case. Besides, he knew the folks down there sweating over those hot gas stoves were probably doing their best, and underpaid to boot.

  Still, he had to make his point. I promise I’ll come back. Just let me go and see my home.

  A compromise. The doctor agreed to let him go if he would come back as an outpatient in three days. So after a complicated rigmarole involving Medicare forms, written prescriptions, and future outpatient appointment dates, the Letinskys agreed to drive Simon to Silver Creek.

  When they pulled up to the yard of the cabin, Simon wanted to open the door and run. He believed he could, he felt so young now, as young as he did when his father, tall and thick-muscled with arms like steel, had picked him up and tossed him into the creek so he could learn to swim. As young as when he plowed these very fields after his father had taken ill. There was something in this air, he thought, that gave a man back years of his life.

  He did not run. Rather, he opened the door gingerly and reached back for his Bible, the white bag containing three plastic bottles of pills, and the cane they had given him at the hospital. He thought about the beautiful, hand-carved cane Julian had brought back from Africa, still in the house, no doubt ruined by water with all the rest of his things. The thought of Julian forced an uneasy feeling; things had not been left well between him and his son. The boy had told him not to stay, to get out of the city, and the disrespect in his tone had bristled like barbed wire against Simon’s thin skin. But the boy had been right. No question now, the boy had been right.

  Out of the car, Simon arched his back fully to stand upright. When Stanley Letinsky tried to help him to the steps, he shooed him away. Oh, I’m all right now, he said, smiling broadly. Y’all can go on. I’m home now. Thank you. And God bless you.

  He made it to the steps slowly, then looked back as the car pulled back onto the gravelly road. Waved his hand in the air. Thank you, thank you so much.

  He peered into the screen door of the cabin, too dark to see inside. He pulled one of the rockers away from the window, and sat, his spindly knees popping as he lowered his body into the chair. Put the cane down next to him on the cedar floor, rocked, and smiled.

  A cooling breeze swept up and soundlessly stirred the leaves of the closest magnolia tree. Quiet here. So quiet. Sweet air, good to breathe. Genevieve would be so surprised, he thought, and wondered where she was. That old Buick she tooled around in was nowhere in sight. The woman never stayed at home anymore. Church, work, and whatnot, and didn’t she say she was seeing somebody? A younger man, ain’t that something. He smiled and clicked his tongue. Her husband Jack had been a good twenty years older. And now she had herself a young thing—probably five, six years younger. Maybe even ten, knowing Genevieve. He couldn’t wait to tease her when he saw her.

  When he gathered himself and felt fairly rested, he got up to go inside. But something stopped his steps. A note pasted to the window. Not a note, a notice of some sort.

  He read the yellow slip of paper as best he could. His glasses didn’t work so well—got to get a new prescription.

  Eviction?

  This was some kind of mistake. He’d straighten it out, now that he was here. He opened the door, looked inside. Some of the furniture lay under white sheets, like large stone ghosts. He went back outside onto the porch.

  He sat in the rocker, his heart racing, his head a little light. Something was wrong. Genevieve was not staying here. Something had happened. He took off his glasses, rubbed his hand along the back of his head.

  Aw, Daddy. No. This can’t be.

  Tears burned his eyes. Genevieve had tried to warn him what was going on. They had lost Silver Creek. It was somebody else’s place now.

  When he awoke an hour later from a bone-deep and weary sleep, still sitting in the rocker, the sun was high above the cabin. He looked out over the tall pine trees, behind which lay the meadow and the cemetery. He wondered if he could walk that far. He needed to talk to Ladeena, to Jacob, needed their counsel and the comfort of their company. But he felt weak now. Weaker than before.

  The notice was still in his lap. He wondered if there was anything he could do. He hadn’t talked to Genevieve since the night of the storm. She’d been talking about the Parettes. Had she known this could happen? She must have suspected something. Something had happened since that night of the storm.

  Well, he would just have to fight to get his land back. Hire a lawyer. Genevieve and he would put their heads together. And maybe Julian could…

  Julian. He heaved a deep sigh. Julian did not want this land, and had produced no children who, someday, might. And it occurred to Simon that no matter what he did now, eventually his son would let the land go anyway. Of that he was certain. And how many more years would he, Simon, be on this earth? There was no reason to fight.

  He got up from the rocker, reeling a little as he stood on his feet.

  He was hungry. He had barely picked at that hospital breakfast of hard dry toast, hard dry egg, runny oatmeal, and lukewarm tea. They had to be joking, calling that a breakfast for a grown man. Surely Genevieve would have left some food in her freezer he could heat up and eat. She always did. Whoever this house belonged to now would just have to wait for it until after he’d eaten.

  He was about to go back inside the house when the distant sound of a car engine broke the quiet.

  He turned to see a small car making the bend from the main road. Genevieve? No, it wasn’t big enough, Genevieve always had to have herself a big car. This looked like one of those little rental jobs the tourists in New Orleans would cruise around in.

  The car didn’t turn at the bend like most cars did, headed down to Local. It seemed to be coming right towar
ds the cabin, but it stopped in the middle of the road. A young man got out. Darn these glasses; they just didn’t work the way they ought to. He strained to see better.

  The young man stood in the road for a moment looking his way, shading his eyes with his hand, then broke out into a run, legs kicking high, right toward him. And in that moment, Simon recognized the same gangly stretch of his own legs when he was a young man, and the tilt of head that had always reminded him of his own father, and the long, ropey arms that had marked every man in his family, as he walked to the edge of the porch, smiling, heart thumping wildly, to meet his son.

  22

  He had stopped the car in the middle of the road.

  Once he had spotted the figure on the porch, he had to stop, get out, and see without the barrier of the windshield, had to be certain what he was seeing was not just what he wanted to see, had to be sure that it was real. So many times before he’d dreamed of his father in a scene much like this—Simon in the distance, smiling, waving toward him—and then awakened from the dream.

  But he had not been sleeping this time. Simon was there, sitting on the porch of the cabin the way he had each summer when Julian was small, calm as you please. As if there had never been a storm.

  He’d left the car there in the middle of the rock-strewn path that led either from the woods to the cabin or from the woods to Local, a road not well traveled. It didn’t occur to him that he could get back in the car and drive the remaining yards to the house; he’d simply broken out into a fierce run, as fast as his legs could carry him.

  He was short of breath when he reached the porch, chest heaving, and at first he just reached out his hand to his father; they had always greeted each other with a handshake. But like a moth pulled into fire, he could not help grabbing his father’s thin body, pulling the smaller, older man close into his chest and hugging him with all his might as the tears slicked his face.

  “It’s all right, son,” Simon said, patting his back, his voice quivering. “Everything’s all right.”

  When he pulled away, Julian wiped his eyes, then sat in the rocker while his father sat next to him, his words tumbling out like spilled rocks.

  “Daddy, we’ve been looking, we didn’t know…we thought you…”

  “Well, I told you I’d be here. I just didn’t say when.”

  Julian leaned forward nearly panting, both forearms on his knees with his hands clasping nervously. “Are you OK? What happened? How’d you get here? Are you OK?”

  Simon shook his head, voice nearly in a whisper. “You told me I shoulda left. I don’t know why I didn’t. I shoulda listened to my son.” He smiled, held up his Bible. “But the good Lord brought me through.”

  Julian was full of questions, his eyes lit with the kind of joy he hadn’t known since the Christmas mornings of childhood. But after a few minutes, Simon held up a hand and pointed toward the path a few yards away.

  The Neon still sat there, door open, dead in the middle of the road.

  Julian laughed. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  When he’d brought the car up into the yard and climbed back up onto the porch, Simon told him everything he could remember: the water swelling and rising in the house, the water in the streets, the sun burning the back of his neck, the helicopter ride over the city, the Convention Center insanity, the long miles walking in the miserable damp heat. The truck driver, waking in the hospital with the nice young nurse, the couple who’d brought him here.

  “They tell me I passed out on the road,” he said. “I don’t know much else.”

  Julian bowed his head, eyes closed, imagining his father lying on a road somewhere, left to the mercy of strangers. “I’m sorry I said stuff to you that…”

  Simon held up his hand. “Son, that’s all past now. I shoulda listened. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  The slip of yellow paper on top of the Bible next to Simon’s chair caught Julian’s eye.

  Simon looked down and picked it up. “Something happened, didn’t it?”

  Julian nodded, speechless, a boulder stuck in his throat.

  Again, his eyes filled up. He rubbed his temples. Then, like a floodgate opening, the events of the last several days poured out: meeting Kevin and learning all about the auction and the sale of the property and trying, with no luck, to get the land back.

  He stopped talking, unable to push more words out around the tears.

  Simon’s shoulders flinched, his heart sinking, though Julian only confirmed what he suspected, and even his own instinct told him this day would come. Twice, Genevieve had mentioned to him about trouble brewing, once before the hurricane, once during it. Nothing she’d said had sparked a sense of urgency until Parette’s accident—that had sent a shiver up his back. He’d promised himself he’d see about the land as soon as the storm was over. The storm. Ladeena had told him so many times, “Simon, you just don’t believe fat meat is greasy!” She was right. He’d always been a bit stubborn, and now he was old and stubborn. When it came to the storm warnings, the one for New Orleans as well as the one for Silver Creek, he just hadn’t seen the danger in those darkening clouds.

  But looking now at Julian, all Simon could think about was his reaction—not at all what he expected. Before, Julian had never seemed to want to hear about Silver Creek; now, the sadness that shadowed his eyes, the tears—his son cared, it seemed, and not just because he, Simon, did. Speaking of Silver Creek, Julian looked as though he had lost his best friend. My, my. Something in my son’s heart has changed.

  Both turned their heads when the engine noise of a truck and the sputter of gravel from the road interrupted the quiet. Kevin parked the Ford in the yard and got out, his eyes curiously fixed on Simon. His mouth opened with a look of stunned surprise, then recognition registered on his face, as if the man he’d never met before were a long lost friend.

  Julian got up and introduced him. Kevin looked at Julian, grinned widely, and grabbed Simon’s hand to pump it. “Sir, this sure is a pleasure.”

  They pulled their rockers together and sat, and leaned their heads back and breathed in the sweet breezes from the creek, as if a large piece of the puzzle of each of their lives had just been found and snapped into place. Kevin was as full of questions as Julian had been, and Simon regaled them with stories of his adventure: the fear, the uncertainty of his life, the certainty of his death. The moment in the hospital when the belief that he would not make it gave way to the giddy joy that he would.

  After a while, the subject turned again to the eviction notice atop Simon’s Bible, and Julian explained the situation: meeting Kevin, the partitioning laws, Larouchette’s company, and the auction. And finally, the insulting offer from Nathan himself.

  Kevin’s voice quieted. “And I should confess to you, sir, the man is my grandfather.”

  “Your grandfather?” Simon’s eyes glazed.

  Kevin’s head hung, his tone apologetic. “We’re not close. In fact, I been working on this a while, trying to help people who are about to lose their land to men like my granddaddy. I’m still trying with your case, sir, but without a will,” he paused, shrugging, “it’s real hard with these cases.”

  “Well,” Simon said, “We’re in trouble, then.”

  They talked on, rocking in the painted rockers, the tone more serious as they tried to figure out the next steps to take. Things looked grim, but Kevin promised to “keep trying until I see the bulldozers coming.”

  Julian mentioned he needed to call Genevieve over at Pastor Jackson’s, and Sylvia, who’d said she’d be in Baton Rouge today. He pulled out his cell phone and dialed the numbers. Both women’s screams of joy could be heard across the whole porch.

  “I wondered where Genevieve was. She’s staying at Pastor Jackson’s?” Simon asked.

  “Ah, yes, she is.”

  He nodded his head. “Well, it’s nice of the pastor to give my cousin a place to stay while all this mess is going on.”

  Julian quietly considered
ways to change the subject.

  He brought up the house in New Orleans. It had fared better than some of the houses—at least it was still standing, even though the furniture and nearly everything inside was ruined and the walls covered in mold. It would have to be gutted, and the insurance agent had told him they would not cover the damage since it was done by water, not wind, and Simon had no flood insurance. They might be in for a long fight.

  “I told them, if there hadn’t been any wind, there wouldn’t have been any storm, and no flood,” Julian said. “But they weren’t buying it.”

  “Now I been paying on that policy for forty years, and they can’t pay me?” Simon said, his voice pitched high. He shook his head, sighed deeply.

  Julian wasn’t sure how to tell Simon about Matthew Parmenter. He decided to wait—he’d already gotten so much bad news. But Simon must have read his thoughts. He’d asked about his friends from church, and from the Elegant Gents Social Aid and Pleasure Club. Sylvia could tell him more, Julian said, but as far as he knew, everyone from the club and from church had evacuated. All were safe.

  “And Matthew Parmenter too?” Simon asked.

  Julian’s eyes paled. His voice dimmed as he broke the disheartening news. Simon’s gaze dropped to his lap; he nodded, not surprised.

  “He told me a while back his time was short.” Simon said quietly. “Did he go peaceful?”

  He’d been to see him the day before, Julian said. “He seemed like a man at peace.”

  Simon pursed his lips and frowned. “Son, I know you didn’t much care for Matthew. He wasn’t perfect, I know that. We saw a lot of things differently.”

  Julian leaned forward in his chair, his elbows resting on his knees.

  Simon sat back in the rocker and folded his hands in his lap. “He was always the ambitious type, always looking to do better. I just never was that kind of man. Like I say, we were different. But we got along.”

  “Daddy, you really didn’t care at all about the recipe, the money and everything, did you?”