by Kent Wascom
—What’s wrong? he said.
—Nothing, she said. You just seem … different.
He mumbled something, her son, and she looked back at him over her shoulder from the head of the stairs. Having children, she realized, was like being at the edge of a cliff that opened on an expanse so high and vast and unknowable that it made you want to lie down on your stomach and cling to the earth.
Five
Kemper left the hotel not long after Isaac, going on foot across Canal, passing the offices of Cuyamel Fruit (one day to merge with their mutual rivals, United Fruit) heading uptown and into the business district and the offices of Gulf Shipping, a seven-story granite temple on the corner of Poydras and Carondelet.
She was met in the lobby by an eager male secretary, who led her upstairs, saying little, and looking at her even less. She wondered if he’d been ordered not to look. When she was younger she would be brought, ceremonially, to the offices a few times a year (on holidays and certain Fridays when her father wanted to take her to the races) but she had not been back from the time she was fifteen and didn’t remember anyone she saw.
She signed the papers in the presence of an attorney and an accountant, neither of whom she knew, in a small boardroom at a table which the secretary equipped with a decanter of water and a blotter, wordlessly removing the ashtray embossed with the stylized waves of the company logo: an oval outlined in what looked like gunsmoke (and which was drawn as such in certain Latin American political cartoons) encompassing a stylized, forward-slanting wave. She listened to the statements of both men, sternly and without much comment, as she imagined the subject of such business must conduct herself. Though she knew from her childhood that real business consisted of nights spent pacing and muttering threats, of her mother’s tears, her plucked nerves, and more than anything of fear—a fear she could never fully grasp, but which afflicts a great many men of business.
As she capped her pen, Red came into the boardroom wearing a suit that might have been one of his father’s but for the cut of the lapels, his chin bearing a thick, pink scar so clear and clean against his skin she thought he might’ve given it to himself, the way she’d heard some young attorneys dyed their temples gray or in the old days wore false whiskers. A product of his desire to seem tested, hard, capable of violence. She rose from the table, not answering the murmured goodbyes of the men, and made her way to the door and Red who stood before it.
Her brother raised his hand and started to say, Wait, but she swept his hand away and shot out into the hall. In the instant that she passed him, she’d glimpsed something strange in his eyes, something caged, and it almost seemed like the next thing he was going to say was Help.
She put this away and hurried through the hall and into the mezzanine of that floor, which opened on the heart of the building, and down the next flight where, leaning at the railing, bent and gaunt, she found her father.
He said her name like a question and it was clear he didn’t know why she was there. He turned to his daughter and she was so stunned by his thinness, by the gnarled shape of his back, that she immediately embraced him, what remained of him, frail under her fingers, and let him hold her arm as they walked from floor to floor, winding down the mezzanine, talking, until they reached the lobby where she, bitterly and for the last time, left him.
She took one of the last trains out of the city, which departed that afternoon with just under two hundred passengers in a driving rain and a headwind that blew up into a full gale by evening and made halting progress through the marshes to the northeast, nudging toward the coast. Nightfall came before its time, the lights in the cars raised, the mood among the passengers growing tenser with each stop, voices gone silent as the cars shuddered on the tracks. It was not yet the time when prayers were openly said, when the train would lurch to a halt, but looking out her rainwashed window as they crossed the Pointe aux Herbes and the track bent north so before the crossing at Chef Menteur Pass (one of the few justly named places in America—the nickname given by the Choctaw to a colonial governor, in honor of his frequent perfidy) she saw that the water surging into Lake Borgne was coming over the tracks.
—You look dark, her father had said. Your neck looks like a country girl’s.
This had been when they were walking down the mezzanine together, circling the chandelier and its gold-leaf fount of bursting fruits, crystal dripping from its arms. Below them a sea of voices.
She smiled at him. —What do you know about the country, she said.
—Not much, thank God, he said. There’s nothing more stupid and Southern than a millionaire talking about fields and fatback and cornbread.
She told him she couldn’t stay, but her father didn’t seem to hear. He went on talking, and she felt the part of herself she’d barred from him open, just a bit. She recognized in him the things she loved. He was not one those soft fathers, always cooing over his little girl (he did not even like when she would sometimes call him Daddy), nor one wracked with nightmares over his daughter’s virginity (he regarded the social mores of his class as he did all such institutions and persons who did not serve his immediate needs, with contempt), nor one of those fathers who recuse themselves from the lives of their daughters out of sheer dismay that they had produced one of the very creatures who’d bedeviled them into the act of conception in the first place (for he was raised by women and, for all his bluster, was more comfortable in their company than that of other men).
He said she should visit her mother and Kemper gave his arm a pat.
—You should do the same, she said.
—My mother died forty years ago, he said. I was at her bedside with her, when there was almost no one left in the city. Eighteen seventy-eight. The worst fever in a generation. Bodies in yards, wherever they fell. Barrels of creosote. I sent your mother and you children off, but I stayed. I was right there with her for almost a month, burning sulfur (the doctors said it did something or another) and mixing washtubs with bichloride of mercury to disinfect her clothes, her sheets. She hated that; it was bad for the fabric. There she was, laid out dying, furious over those ruined dresses. But I suppose your mother was furious too, with me for staying, for having to take you all.
—I wasn’t alive then, Dad, Kemper said.
But he didn’t seem to hear and went on talking about how he’d made plans to strip the wallpaper from his mother’s house, he was so sure she would live, telling Kemper about the house itself, the little place on Kerlerec where they’d moved in the third year of the war and where he and Marina had done the last of their growing up together. How small it was, how many pounds of sulfur you had to burn per room. Nine pounds! he said. Think about that.
—Finally my mother said to me, Baby I’d rather die than smell that anymore. She wanted rosewater and hibiscus. Bay lime. She hadn’t called me “baby” in years. So I kept on with the sulfur and medicine but she kept getting weaker and weaker, weaker than I knew possible. She’d never once been weak. A weak woman couldn’t have gotten us through my father’s death and what came after, couldn’t have buried one man and killed another, or have it done, in the span of a year at the age of thirty-four. But she was so weak then I had to help her on and off the pot, which is a thing to do, I can tell you, lifting your mother like that.
—You never told me this before, she said.
Her father stopped.
—Why would I have, he said.
She didn’t know, couldn’t say. They were two floors from the street and you could see the carts and trucks passing in the windows, goods hurtling through the first of the rain.
—It’s funny, he said, turning to Kemper. There was a lot of help from the North then. Piles and piles of clothes sent down from New York. I read about the drives later, the people lining up on Broadway feeling good about themselves. He laughed: When it was all over and they reopened the river in late November, when my mother and God knows how many people were dead, the city of St. Louis sent down a pair of relief boats. No
thing had come into New Orleans for months. And I remember standing at the landing, waiting for those ships, alone. They unloaded four tons of ice and crates of canned food and, I’ll never forget, fifteen hundred bottles of champagne, two hundred gallons of whiskey, and four hundred cases of Budweiser beer. I’d buried her that morning.
Word passed from car to car, by porters and passengers, that the keeper of the bridge ahead had refused to raise the draw for oncoming ships and abandoned his post some hours earlier. Now the pylons were snarled with wrecked schooners and lugs, those who’d aimed to ride out the storm and whose crews had climbed the legs of the bridge and now clung to the trestle and the tracks.
Not long after the news came to Kemper’s car, so too did a sailor, limp and soaked, carried by passengers from the front and laid out across a row of seats near her aisle. Towels and blankets were found in a porter’s hutch and the man was being bandaged and dried when the car began to shudder with the waves and the train jerked into motion again. Unbeknownst to them, the engineer had decided to try to cross the pass and get as far as they could from the open water, into the marsh where the waves would be broken. When Kemper pressed her cheek to the window, straining to see ahead, she saw the forward cars moving through the waves.
They made it as far as Bay St. Louis, where the waves had torn the tracks away and, in the same way they’d heard about the bridge, the passengers got word that the train would go no farther. They would be here for whatever was to come.
—Is Marina sick? she’d said to her father when they’d come to the ground floor.
—You think that’s why I’m telling you this?
Kemper shrugged.
—Well, I wouldn’t know if she was, he said, his faint voice wandering in the desert of his throat. Her father stopped to catch his breath and when he had it asked if she’d seen Red.
—I don’t have anything to say to him, she said.
—So he hasn’t told you.
—What?
Later she would tell herself that she’d done the right thing by staying, hearing him out. Every word of the whole rotten thing until her father stopped and all that lay between them was silence, golden fruit, and crystal light. He told her that her brother, Angel, was dead.
—Where?
—In Nicaragua. Killed in the fighting. One of their damn wars.
—How long have you known?
—We’ve … we heard things, but couldn’t be sure. Now—
—How long?
His face bent into a scowl. —A year, almost two.
No words came to her then, no expression for this hurt. He was saying they’d only heard rumors, didn’t know for sure, that he didn’t want to tell her, God, much less her mother, until he knew for certain. He stared up at her, shrinking. In a moment she would go past him into the lobby and there would be the secretary, the car, the train, the storm. She couldn’t bring herself to speak, but she could and did take her father’s hands for a moment, before she let him go.
This man, so fragile now, saying this wasn’t how he wanted it to be.
The roar of wind then, and the cars rocking and the marsh around them an unbroken sheet of rushing water. The voices of the people near her rising as they made frantic gambler’s negotiations with their god or wept or talked, aimless words, bouncing children on their knees or holding the hand of the person next to them. The windows lit of a sudden and great legs of lightning raced over the water. Kemper made her way up the aisle, holding a lost child of indefinite sex. The car was shaking, and as she held the squirming child she thought of the house on Deer Island, torn apart and flung in fragments across the Gulf, objects of her childhood summers swept south by currents to wash up in Cuba for her mother to find. It did not matter that her mother lived a good distance from the coast; Kemper imagined the people with wings coming down from their mountain hidingplaces to the beach and picking up the dish or dress or water-logged sheet music and, flying inland, depositing them on her mother’s doorstep. When the sky went bright again the child had broken free and Kemper fell into the next seat she could find. The car shook. It was just past midnight.
Around this time the house on Deer Island was taken apart. The water unseated the foundation, broke down doors; the wind snatched tiles from the roof and then the boards beneath, bursting windows and tearing, finally, the whole roof away so that the house lay hollow as a bleached skull. By morning all that remained were three walls belted with dark mud and seaweed, as Isaac saw when he rowed from his parents’ house, which had luckily only taken on a foot or so of water, across to Biloxi. There he heard from fishermen who’d ridden out the storm on their boats that a train from New Orleans had been trapped on the trestle not far past Bay St. Louis. Seeing him grow pale, and because they were heading out that way to check on cousins and assess the damage done (and salvage what they could from ships wrecked in the marsh, though none mentioned this), the fishermen agreed to take him along as a hand. So at eight that morning he was aboard a croaking shrimper that smelled of iodine and from which dried scales fluttered in the air as they motored up the coast, dodging rafts of flotsam, the men turning to point at various wonders. A drowned cow. A sailboat in the treetops off Pass Christian.
Isaac at the gunnels, holding on to hope.
The first boats that came upon the stalled train were pirogues poled by boys from a rat’s nest settlement in the marsh, their families the owners of a clapboard store that had yet to turn a profit. Upon seeing them, the passengers hung out the traincar windows, poured onto the tracks, shouting, waving handkerchiefs. The boats were too small to take on any refugees and besides they had no way of getting the stranded people down. Instead, the boys sold them bottled drinks at an enormous premium, and most were too stunned and thirsty to balk. So by means of a basket lowered by knotted sheets from the sleeping car the exchange was made and the clearing day saw Kemper sitting on the tracks, legs dangling free, sipping a warm Grapico she’d uncapped on the head of a spike. She heard the shouts from farther on that a boat was coming alongside. She smiled, flush with life, and watched as the passengers rushed to the edge of the tracks. Bodies so tight-packed she couldn’t see the boat as it neared or that from it leapt a man who scrambled up the trestle leg and shoved through the people on the tracks, calling something out. And it was only when he was almost on top of her that she believed it was his voice, her name.
PART 4
False Blue Sky
1915 – 1917
One
They moved so quickly then, like those creatures whose lives are gone in one beautiful, unbroken rush, hurrying before tomorrow finds them. Like the pale moths that returned each spring or the locusts’ summer-long outcry that prefaces a sixteen-year silence, without dread or desperation but with purpose written in their blood. So fast that, when Isaac looked back, it would seem all one swift motion. A breathless sprint that lasted three years, the best, they would agree, of their lives. Neither would confess this to the other, though both knew it to be true. Much later, when flashes of that time lit the darkness of his old age, he would see her again, as she was in that season.
A time of nevers: She had never held a duckling, never gathered eggs. Never knelt by seedbeds or the nest of a tern. Never shared a bed for longer than a night or fallen asleep with a body close to hers full with the knowledge that it would be there when she woke. Never organized a house of her own. Never, she realized, felt loved, much less the sole focus of a love that leapt and burned into hours of exhaustion. Never known the wonder of saying what you wanted and having this other so willing to give or try; never felt so powerful and yet so afraid as then, when he was hers and even a cross word, much less a fight, could stun him into silence or fill his eyes with tears. Never known a tongue inside her or the taste of semen, just as he had never known the taste of himself mingled with another or the iron mystery of menstrual blood. He’d never been so free, so gone from the world, as though she’d stolen him away. Never known what it meant to truly need, all co
nsequence channeled into one other person. And they grew each with their discoveries as nevers became known and they built their life, a wall that shut out a world which, in the years leading up to their country’s entry into the Great War, was increasingly bent on destroying itself.
They bought a runabout Packard I-38 from a dealer in New Orleans whose family name Kemper recognized from her grandfather’s book, a name that formerly hung over the city’s most extensive slave-pens. She loved the car, all gleaming brass and whitewall tire, the roar of its six cylinders, but Isaac, horrified already by the cost, which was more than their house, more than his parents’ house, shied from it like a dog at a loud noise, so they bought a bicycle too, which he rode to Biloxi where he still did occasional work for his brother. And as it happens in the country, they came into a menagerie of fowl: hens and guineas, red-faced Muscovy ducks that fought like drunks and roosted in the trees and rooted for insects in the dirt and leaves scattered beneath the underpinnings of their house.
The house had belonged to a once-prosperous German family, owners of a sawmill some miles inland, who had gone bust and left their land and business to the bank, seeking their fortunes elsewhere. The house had stood vacant for three years before Kemper and Isaac, who had planned for a more distant move after their wedding, found it on a ride and fell immediately in love with the place and, more, the land it stood on. Sited six miles down the coast from his parents’ house, the property ran one acre wide and three deep. The land was cut out of old French arpents, bordered east and west by a V of creeks which fed into the bay, and to the north by the remains of a sawmill. Beyond was only an ugly stretch of stumps, sawgrass, and bayonet palm. But the Germans had chosen a fine place shielded from their work, and the trees there were spreading oaks and slash pine, and maple, which also served to screen the property from the lone road that passed nearby, accessible only by a shaded path of oystershell. In the shadows of the trees grew moss that held green for most of the year and spread in a carpet between the main house and the shed where the Germans had kept their adolescent sons and which Isaac converted to his studio.