“Good God, Aunt Vicky!”
Victoria glanced from her nephew to Berg. “I guess that shocks you, Mr. Syme, but people were dying like flies then, up in the missions, and somebody had to get up and do something about it.”
“Call me Simon.” Berg tapped her shoulder. “You were a missionary, this I didn’t know.”
“I’m a salesman. I’ve got no use for missionaries.” She folded her arms tightly. “I wasn’t about to stand around while they handed out crossed sticks and hymnbooks, when women were sitting right there in the dirt outside the doors holding dead children in their laps.”
Berg breathed a long sigh. “…This you saw?…This you saw.…The world, Victoria my friend, is to weep.…Anywise, as you say, nine times out of ten.”
Raleigh had listened without taking his eyes off Gates, and Gates had not taken his hands off the tree bough. Sun luminous on the black curls and beautiful suit, the man swayed back and forth as if he were a swing tied to the branch. “Oh Gates, Gates,” said Raleigh to himself, and then to Victoria and Simon, he said, “See you later.”
Hayes walked back to the middle of the square, where his father now waited beside Billie, his trumpet raised, for Toutant Kingstree to finish an extravagant set of variations on “St. Louis Woman.” A fairly large-sized crowd had collected to listen.
Raleigh put his hands quietly on his father’s shoulders. “Hi, Specs. Vicky okay? You okay?”
“We’re just fine.” The old man’s shirt was wet, his skin cold, his arms shaky. Turning him around, Raleigh took the trumpet and pointed it past the fountain at the gleaming figure beneath the magnolia. “Daddy, don’t y’all ever take a break? Look over there. My baby brother’s been waiting a long time to say hello.”
Chapter 32
How Raleigh Was Ordained in The Cave OF THE THERMOPYLEANS AND THEIR FRIENDS, our hero was the last to leave Jackson Square. He stayed there with his father until long after dark.
Jubal Rogers did not come between noon and six—the hours Earley had promised to wait. No one was surprised.
Allen Thornhill left to teach a class. Before he went, Toutant Kingstree handed him $12.75, a fourth of the donations dropped in the case on the pavement. Simon Berg took Gates to the docks to look at the freighter he was boarding for South America at midnight. Kingstree wanted to check out, just for his own personal satisfaction, The Cave, where Allen had invited them to play, and he asked Mingo to come along. They arranged to meet Billie there before supper, to work out a list of numbers. In the meantime, Victoria was taking Billie back to the hotel to rest.
While the girl was packing her sheet music together, Kingstree said he had some advice about singing he wanted her to think about before tonight, some advice about originality: “Listen here, don’t get me wrong. Billie Holiday was the best there ever was, but sooner or later you got to cut yourself loose from the Lady. All right? Learning from her, that’s fine. Stealing from her, that’s fine too. I have ripped off Lester Young, child, for all he was worth. Jubal now, your grandpa, he turned guys like Benny Goodman inside out. Turned them mad and mean, took the top off their heads when he wanted to. But that’s my point: you just take what you can use. You got to go down in and take a good look around yourself and pull that you on out and see what it has to say. Earley here understands how I mean, don’t you, Earley?”
Earley Hayes was lying on the grass beside Raleigh; his shirt was damp and his white hair was stuck with perspiration to his forehead. He said to the sky, “Mister Kingstree, it didn’t take me anywhere near three hours to know you and I are not in the same league.”
“Well, that’s true,” the tall saxophonist agreed solemnly. “You got no wind left. No sustain to speak of. And it’s a pig in a poke what you’re going to do on that high D every time.” Kingstree thrust his long arms into his peach pleated jacket and brushed off the sleeves. “But, Earley, listen here, you got a style. And that’s the bottom line. That’s God’s doing.”
Earley raised up on his elbows; his blue eyes brightened with tears. He stared at the black man. “Thank you,” he finally said. “You wouldn’t shit me, would you?”
“Man, I don’t ever shit with music.”
Earley grinned. “Goddamn, I wish we were sitting right here, twenty years old!”
Kingstree nodded. “You and me both. I waited too long. Forty years old! I’d take forty.”
“I’d take sixty,” Earley laughed.
Victoria Hayes snatched up two shopping bags. “Well, if I were you two fools, I’d go take a nap, instead of dawdling around here, crying for the moon. Raleigh, don’t let him lie there on that grass until the dew falls. Are you ready to go, Billie?”
The girl turned slowly in a circle, looking toward the cathedral and toward the French Market. “You don’t think Jubal’s coming, do you, Victoria?”
The old woman straightened her back. “No.…I’ll put you on the plane Monday. You fly to Charleston and go see him there. If Earley’d had a lick of sense, that’s what he would have done in the first place, as soon as he found out he wasn’t in New Orleans.”
Earley sat up, hugging his thin knees. “I know. I’m sorry. You’re probably right, Vicky.”
She glared at her brother. “I am absolutely right. Earley Hayes, I tell you this, ever since I was a little girl I have wondered what in the world God had on His mind when he made yours!”
Laughing, Earley shouted after the square straight shoulders. “Me too! Hey, Vicky! VICKY ANNA! I LOVE YOU.”
The two women turned around. “Tell the world about it,” Victoria said.
Raleigh and his father sat on the grass side by side. The sky turned orange, then pink, then indigo blue. For a while, the sun and moon were in the sky together with the first evening stars.
Earley talked in his soft reedy whisper to his son as they waited.
“…I’d seen Jubal with women, even at nineteen. And Vicky, well, you know the kind of person she is, and, Christ, she was almost engaged to Zeb Forbes, and…well, I almost killed Jubal.…I don’t think she ever forgave me. I know he didn’t.
“…I never thought Flonnie would tell Vicky about Josh when she came home after the war…I was in a bad way then myself, and no help to anybody. I’d screwed up my marriage with your mom past forgiveness. My church was kicking me out on my ass for the sins of fornication and, quote, ‘nigger sympathies.’ Jubal would have loved that.
“…No, Jubal never found Joshua. During the war, his wife Leda just left New York with another guy, went out West and took Josh with her. Maybe she honestly thought Jubal was never coming back, or maybe she thought he’d been killed in Germany, maybe they told her that. God knows. Jubal spent a lot of years looking for them. I only know because he kept up with Flonnie, thinking maybe Josh would come back to Thermopylae, I guess.…Josh was only thirty-one when he died, Raleigh.…Thirty-one years old.…I don’t even know if Jubal knows or not.
“…Oh, Specs, who knows what a calling means. I felt like God had picked me out to shepherd one of His flocks. I was going to bring everybody together. I was going to integrate the world. Christ Almighty, what an asshole I was! Drove the whole herd off in a by fuck stampede. Ran the ones I loved the most over a cliff. Vicky. Jubal. Your mother. Gates. What I didn’t manage to screw up with my vices, I put my virtues to work on. They did even worse. Lend me your jacket. I’m freezing my ass off.”
Raleigh draped his sports coat over his father’s shoulders. The sleeves trailed down onto the grass.
Earley shook the last cigarette out of his pack and lit it. “That’s what scared me about you, Raleigh. I lay in that damn hospital and said, shit, that pompous ass is just shriveling with virtue, evaporating to where Aura won’t even be able to find him, and he won’t even know he’s disappeared. I said, that lucky bastard is going to blow it. See, I hadn’t worried about you, Specs. I knew Gates was fucking up. He made sure we all knew, didn’t he? I knew I’d fucked up. But I didn’t see, till you and Vicky stuck me in that ho
spital like that, how far gone you were, son.”
In the blue moonlight, Raleigh Hayes looked a long time at the small, thin old man seated on the grass beside him, hugging his knees. Finally he spoke. “Listen to me. Mama never stopped loving you. Vicky never stopped loving you. Gates never stopped loving you. And, Daddy—despite the fact that you couldn’t figure out any better plan to keep me from being a pompous ass than the insanity you put me through the last few weeks—I never stopped loving you.”
Earley’s warm, reedy laugh sang out over the square. “When Joshua’s child walked into the hospital the way she did, it all came smack together. I’ll tell you this, I leaped off that bed like Lazarus. God was saying to me, ‘Okay, you little fuck, I’m gonna hold the curtain for you; get your ass down to New Orleans. Do something for this girl, do something for yourself, do something for your sons.’ It was a beautiful plan!”
Raleigh smiled. “Let’s get up off this wet grass and you come show me what you want out of Tiny’s goddamn trunk.”
“‘Ready or not, Jesus is coming’? That doesn’t sound like you, Specs.” “Daddy, for Pete’s sake, you don’t think I put that sticker there,
do you? Here. Here’s Lovie’s Bible. And here’s your trumpet. No, wait
a minute. That’s my trumpet. Yours is in Gates’s bag.” Raleigh put the
book and the horn down on the hood. “Look at this car! It’s a wreck,
and I haven’t even made the first payment!”
Earley Hayes walked around the white Cadillac. “Jimmy sold you
this, hunh? Hell, I’d hate to see the clunkers he sells people he’s not
related to, because, I tell you, that Big Ellie convertible he unloaded
on me wasn’t lemon yellow by accident.”
“Well, let’s take it back. It’s bound to be on at least a thirty-day
warranty.” Raleigh had hauled out the steamer trunk, and was now
lugging the plaster bust of PeeWee Jimson over to the sidewalk. “I gave it to Billie. Vicky Anna wouldn’t let me do anything else
for her, because she wanted to hog it, you know, paying her tuition
and all. You know how she likes to be in charge.”
It occurred to Raleigh Hayes that he had possibly just lost to
Billie Rogers his inheritance from his aunt Victoria, possibly including the house on East Main Street, in which a dental clinic and a
Seven-Eleven chain had already expressed interest. “Daddy, you’ve
got to stop giving things away!”
“Why? You want to bury me in a fucking Cadillac?” Earley knelt
beside the old steamer trunk and pushed up its rusty latch. “And stop talking about burying you here and not burying you
there. In the first place, you’re not going to die.”
“I’m not? That’ll be a first. Even God’s only Son died and I don’t
have anywhere near His connections.”
“In the second place, I can’t bury you at Knoll Pond! People have
to be buried in the proper places.”
“Oh, bullshit. Hey, what’s my cassock doing on top here? I stuck
it down at the bottom.”
Raleigh grabbed at the small rumpled black vestment as his
father felt through its pockets. “Damn! So, there’s where Simon got
it. I’m sorry, Daddy, Simon Berg must have borrowed this. We had to,
ah, use a lot of the clothes in there. For, well, one reason or
another…Are you telling me I brought that trunk all the way down
here so you could get your old cassock out of it?!”
“Well, sounds like it came in handy.” Earley pulled a letter from
the cassock’s inside pocket, and handed it to his son. “Give this to
Vicky, okay?” Raleigh moved closer to the streetlamp. It was a plain
opened envelope with a three-cent stamp, addressed to “Earley
Hayes, 5 East Main, Thermopylae, N.C.” The postmark was not, as
Raleigh originally thought, 1983, but 1953. The return address was
“Rogers, P.O. Box 373, New Orleans, La.” Inside was a sealed envelope, addressed in the same careful handwriting with the single word,
“Victoria.”
When Hayes looked back around, his father had taken the military sword that Weeper Berg had also once borrowed, and with it was
slitting open the brittle lining of the trunk’s lid. He stuck his arm
down inside and pulled out a square of paper, which he carefully
unfolded; then taking the large frayed Bible from the car hood, he
opened it and showed Raleigh that the edge of the piece of paper fit the rip where the first page of the book of Job had been torn out. At the top of the page, fastidiously written in small pale brown script around the margins, were the words, “Gen. G. H. Hayes. Gen. Goodrich H. Hayes. Lt. Gen. Hayes. Hayes. Hayes. He saith among the trumpets Ha, ha, & he smelleth the battle afar off. The thunder
of the captains & the shouting. 39:25. Jess’s hearth, Apr. 15, 1865.” “Daddy, what in hell is going on here?”
“Did you bring a gun?…Here, thanks for the jacket. Nice jacket.
New?” Earley pulled on the black cassock and started buttoning it. “What do you want a gun for?”
The old man patted the fat white plaster face of PeeWee Jimson.
“Shoot this shit between the eyes.”
Raleigh threw his arms up in the air. “You are crazy. I am not
about to let you shoot a gun off in a public place. We’d be arrested in
two seconds.” He pointed at the passing cars and strolling pedestrians and at the French Market café across the street where people sat
drinking coffee. “Listen. Where do you want to be at ten o’clock? Do
you want to be playing your trumpet at The Cave or do you want to
be down at the police station? It’s as simple as that.”
“Well, I was looking forward to plugging PeeWee, but maybe
you’re right, Specs.”
“Maybe?! Daddy, what are you doing?! Put that thing down!
Jesus!”
With a groan Earley Hayes had lifted the plaster bust as high as
he could, and then hurled it down on the edge of the sidewalk pavement. The head snapped off and rolled over the curb. “How about a
lug wrench then?” the old man said.
What was inside the head of PeeWee Jimson, as rendered by his
widow Gladys, was a piece of paper the Reverend Earley Hayes had
stuck there one December afternoon in 1957, as soon as Mrs. Jimson
left the dining room, where she was applying plaster to her husband’s
bust. She left the room after telling Reverend Earley Hayes that the
vestry would very much appreciate his immediate resignation from
St. Thomas Church. She left the room in a hurry because Earley
Hayes, declining her invitation to resign, had just called her “a by
fuck racist bitch.” As the former priest now told his son, many
decades later, the idea had come to him in a flash to embed a certain piece of paper he had with him in PeeWee’s memorial as a poetic irony, or in his phrase, a practical joke. He thought it would be a wonderful joke if hidden right behind the hoggish eyes of the man who’d ruined his father, Clayton, was the coded key to even more Hayes-begotten wealth. For, by then, just after Clayton Hayes’s death, the Jimsons owned the Knoll Pond property, and by then, Earley had figured out the meaning of the piece of paper, scribbled with numbers and, like the Bible page, dated 1865, that years earlier he’d found buried on that property. He’d found it under a hearth brick in the little cabin that was all Federal troops had left standing
of the Goodrich Hale Hayes home once called Knoll Pond House. Bewildered, Raleigh examined the yellow sheet, cracked along
its folds. There was nothing on it but a peculiar a
rrangement of numbers and symbols, written in the same faint brown ink.
3.15(6) 1.7 (22-24) 1.5 (31-34)
1.7 (17) 1.10 (11-12) 38.6 (11-12) 9.9 (12) 1.7 (18-19) 1.10 (5-6) 9.17 (9) 1.2 (7,9-10)
41.32 (4) 1.7 (18-19) 41.24 (18)
9.9 (12) 42.16 (5-8) 40.17 (7)
38.24 (1-7) 2.11 (4) 3.6 (25-30)
40.21 40.22
40.14 (9-12) 20.25 (11-13) 38.31 (14)
They didn’t look like any system of mathematics or measurement with which Raleigh was familiar. “Is this some kind of code?” he asked his father, who was tossing pieces of Jimson’s bust into a trashcan chained to a palm tree. “Are you trying to tell me you think this is some kind of stupid treasure map that this man Goodrich Hayes left behind during the Civil War?”
“That’s right. See if you can figure it out. You’ve got the key in your hand. Now, I dug up that chart one day when I was a teenager, out there at the cabin sneaking some liquor. But it wasn’t till just after Papa died, when I was so down, I was spending a lot of time with Job, that I saw how General Hayes had devised his system. Wish I could have met him; sounds like he was a real weirdo.” Earley looked at the broken plaster face. “God, PeeWee was a pig. Gladys got his eyes just right.” He dropped the head in the basket. “And now, Specs, the wheel turns, by holy fuck, and you’ve brought that land back to your family.” He chuckled. “And dirt cheap too! That knocked my socks off, the way you bargained with Pierce.” Brushing white dust from his arms, the old man belted his cassock tighter to keep the hem off the ground. “So, Raleigh, my son, that’s my legacy to you.” He smiled, raising his hand in benediction. “That and this great vacation you’ve been on. Because, listen, give whatever’s left in the damn bank to Gates. Throw my will out. I don’t remember what it says exactly, but seems like I left everything to you.”
“That’s exactly what it says.” Raleigh jerked off his glasses. “What do you mean, you don’t remember?”
“I mean, the damn details. But that’s awful, isn’t it? I must have been really pissed at Gates that day. I didn’t leave him anything?”
Handling Sin Page 63